Harvey Lacey’s Ubuntu-Blox block building machine was featured in seventh place in yesterday’s blog post on Top 10 Cottage Industry Products. Today’s blog post shows how his block making process has shifted to using extremely low cost materials – vetiver roots, the waste material from making vetiver oil. The end result is similar to straw bales except the bales are smaller, lighter, more insect resistant and they’re made on site with waste materials. The mini bales are less expensive than ordinary straw bales, take up less space and can be made without an expensive baling machine. His open source plans make it easy for anyone to build his machine quite easily.
low cost
Buildbag — Earthbag in the Netherlands
“The Buildbag Philosophy
According the United Nations it is estimated that approximately 1,6 billion people live in substandard housing and 100 million people are homeless globally, due to poverty, wars and natural disasters. Moreover, we have an ever-growing world population. This means we are not capable of solving this problem by conventional building; a fundamental breakthrough is needed.
Rocket Mass Heaters 4-DVD Set
“The annual cost of a rocket mass heater is less than a tenth of the annual cost of natural gas – and that’s if you buy the fuel instead of harvest it yourself. And a rocket mass heater emits less than a tenth of the greenhouse gasses. Many rocket mass heaters will heat a home with a tenth of the wood of what a conventional wood stove will use.
Stockade Style Walls
Most readers are probably familiar with old military forts in the wild west days of the US that were built with vertical wood poles set closely together. The same building method can be used for houses and other structures.
Adobe Vaults in Tamil Nadu, India
There’s no detailed information about these particular vaults, but they look great and I wanted to share this with readers. They look like leaning adobe vaults by the famous Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy, author of Architecture for the Poor. This method uses thinner, medium sized adobe blocks mortared together with mud. The adobes are set into sloping arches that lean against an end wall..
Golden Bamboo Ceilings
I posted a photo a while back about the new roofing tile on our earthbag roundhouse. The exterior looks great, and the roofing tile won’t take any maintenance for 20-30 years. But like I said in that blog post the ceiling is unfinished. The thatch roof that was on it before made a gorgeous ceiling, but the upkeep was too much since thatch here only lasts about three years. It occurred to me that bamboo would look really good on the ceiling. One option is golden or yellow bamboo as shown in these images.