superinsulation
Turning Round Straw Bales into Rectangular Building Bales
Cliff, one of our long time readers, sent me the photo above and the following email.
“Just a heads up on something I see coming in the future in the straw bale world. Small round bales. Lots of reasons. There are a lot of lifestyle or small farmers who can’t afford or need the big expensive bales. These smaller balers are much cheaper to buy and operate. The bales are much more weather resistant than square bales. Here in NZ they can fit down a row of vines in a vineyard. Any other baler can’t go there. I think we may see some innovation in the straw bale building world. You use what is available and as these become more available people will adapt to using them.”
Straw Bale Dome Home in France
This fine looking home in France was built for a materials cost of only £2,500 ($3,800). This is one of the nicest homes we’ve profiled recently. Projects like this really keep me energized about natural building. Please forward to everyone you know and help this go viral.
Affordable Lava Rock Insulation for the Far North
Porous lava rock — scoria (cinders) and pumice — is an ideal building material. We’ve covered this amazing material many times on our blog, but I just learned something very exciting. It turns out scoria is available in Alaska, British Columbia and to some extent the Yukon. All these areas have cinder cones (a type of volcano) that produce scoria. This is great news because porous lightweight lava rock is a good insulator and also fireproof, rot proof, easy to work with and doesn’t attract pests. It’s affordable if there’s a nearby source to minimize shipping costs. So this discovery makes it practical to build lightweight superinsulated earthbag houses in Alaska and Canada. Use the search engine on the right to search this site for details and example projects.