If you have heard of Earthships and Really want to understand what they are about, and how Biotecture works then this series is for you! What you will read below are my transcribed words of two very special videos that were filmed during an Earthship Seminar in Taos, New Mexico, USA. No one has ever transcribed these videos before, and they are very long at around 4 hours! So what I have done is to get this all in text, edited and a lot of ums and uhs removed so that you can get to this information very quickly! You can also watch the first part of the video at the end of this if you would like to see his crazy drawings as well! The people who attend these seminars pay a lot of money to attend and learn this valuable knowledge, but by the magic of the Internet and Steem I am bringing it to you and the blockchain to be preserved!

If you do read or watch this and have aNY questions please ask in the comments. I am happy to educate and help you to understand this. Bioteture is amazing in so many ways, and even after 20 years I still have not seen a model of sustainable building that even comes close in so many important areas such as performance, carbon footprint, longevity, ease of build, etc. Now you can also come to understand what Biotecture Really Is about!

Earthship Seminar 2009 Transription Part 1

Earthship Seminar 2009 Part 1

The basic structure of an earthship is totally integrated with the heating and cooling, and in fact, integrated with the systems as well. So a way to look at this is... These are machines....you know... yeah they're shelters, they're homes, houses whatever you want to call them in terms of that, but... they're machines and the look of them and the structure of them and everything about them is a result of what it takes to encounter the natural phenomena on the planet that are gonna provide what you need.

In other words... if you're gonna catch water, obviously, you're not gonna do a roof like this, you're gonna do a roof like this. And the same for the thermal, solar, electric, everything. So in that, they're machine... an easy way for me to explain it to myself is... It's much like the human body.

The human body is a circulatory system... a nervous system, a digestive system, a respiratory system, all of these systems are in the human body. You can't just apply these systems to the human body, the look of the human body is really a result of the systems. And these buildings are pretty much that way, so... You know, you can't say: 'Well, I want my respiratory system on my leg.' or something like that, you know... *small laughter* It's not gonna work out.

And it's almost that ridiculous. People... you know, people tell us: 'We really like this concept but we want this here and that there.' It's not that easy to do that. It's the machine and the understanding of the encounter with the natural phenomenon is what designs it. I don't really design this machine, I'm just finding it. I'm finding how it works. We're finding more... I've been doing this for... 40 years, I guess. And each year, it keeps evolving more. We're just now scratching the surface of what is really possible in terms of encountering the natural phenomena.

And... So, the relationship of these buildings to the human body is a good way to look at it because in it causes you to understand why... you can't really have your particular design and then apply these things. So, today we'll get into the structure which involves the heating and cooling. And the first, the component of heating and cooling... is... thermal mass. And a lot of people don't really, even architects and engineers, really don't realize what thermal mass is.

The way I look at it... The book 'Comfort in Any Climate' goes into it, but... If you have a chunk of matter, two chunks of matter... one is mass and one is insulation, and there's a big difference. In mass, it's dense. The molecules are really tightly packed. That's what creates density. And because they're tightly packed, temperature just can move through it. Passing from one to the next, to the next, to the next. So, it's like... it's very dense.

Insulation is just the opposite. Insulation is a bunch of air spaces, really. Created in a lot of different ways by weird materials or natural materials, but... what happens with insulation is, unlike mass, that they'll let just temperature pass right through it, and if you trap it with insulation, then it get stored in it. Insulation stops it, you can't... the temperature, whether it's cold or hot, doesn't... It has a hard time traveling, very far.

So, insulation really blocks the movement of temperature and mass... allows it to just go in like water going into a barrel, really. So, if this is a dense chunk of mass temperature can go right into it. And so these buildings, so, if you... if you take a dense chunk of mass then, and insulate three sides of it, and... subject one side of it to a temperature influx, be it cold or hot, it's just gonna go in here and can't go out, because of the insulation, so you're trapping it. Very much like... water being caught in a barrel, temperature is caught in mass. So that's the... That's the... the building blocks of these buildings.

And so... the ideal walls in would have mass AND insulation. That's the difference between this and straw bale. Straw bale construction is great... method of building, because it's using a renewable product. But it's only insulation, so it doesn't store the temperature. And an example of storing the temperature is like if you take a... a cast iron skillet or a... and a tin pan, both. And put them on the stove at the same time. The heavy, dense, cast iron skillet gets hot, the tin pan gets hot. Turn the stove off, and really, less than in a minute later, The tin pan is cooling down. 5-10 minutes later the iron skillet will still burn your hand. That's the example right their of... mass storing... energy. And so, that's... the thing that we determined decades ago that you should build buildings out of. Now, you couple that with the fact...

So we were looking for a massive way to build. Early, in the early days, they were using... water is a very dense mass, So, they were using drums filled with water, we actually did some water can houses, adobe, stone... but, we were at the same time... responding to a... the... The garbage situation on the planet. And we were building buildings out of beer cans before we even stumbled in to this mass thing. The mass thing kind of came out from the physicists... in the early 70's. When we had the first... hint of an energy crisis. And people were all, all the engineers and scientists were trying to build mass in houses. We were already fooling around with building houses out of beer cans.

So... we looked around and what else there was a lot of on this planet? And it was tires. And we started stuffing dirt into tires, and than beating it into tires, and so you have a... a tyre, that is a steel-belted rubber casing, and you beat it full of earth, you have a 2,5 ft(~76 cm) thick, chunk of mass in cased in steel-belted rubber, the material that you're using is dirt which is everywhere. Tires are really everywhere, tires are indigenous to the entire planet. If you came here from another planet... and saw all the tyre piles and the tires, you think they grew here just like trees. *giggle* And in fact, they do. I mean, we've been everywhere. Bolivia, India... Everywhere we go, they've got tires. Just like they have trees.

So... They have actually a problem with tires. You never hear anybody saying: 'There are too many trees!' but... you do hear people saying: 'There are too many tires!' And 'Too many people!' probably, but... Anyway, so tires are indigenous to the entire planet, they are a great, massive way to build. They are low-tech, they don't require equipment, they require very little training, So when you... When we were trying to... evolve a method of building of a mass building, we stumbled onto this really and... That was 30 years ago and we really haven't found anything better.

In other words... If I found some better way to achieve a massive structure, I would use it immediately. But I haven't. So we... and when you... when you put all of these criteria together, it's really almost unbeatable. The fact that they are indigenous to the entire planet, that it's low-tech, that it's getting rid of something that we... have a problem with, that it is structurally super. I don't know, if Kirsten showed you the cement truck, loaded, driving onto the tyre wall last night. It's superstructure, and it's very good for earthquake because it's resilient. And it's like I say: it's mass. It's mass that stores temperature.

So that's what we started in the old days, building this 'U'-s, very much like that, and out of tires, and admitting the sun from the south, and... we had... ...that's what this building really is. This building is a... I don't know... 12-14 years old, or something like that, or more. It's out of date, really. But it's still... in terms of taking care of you, keeping you alive, it can produce... food, some... it produces water, produces power, and it stays pretty much this temperature year around. We open windows at the front and skylights at the back for cooling a little bit, we've refined that radically now. We obviously get the heat from the south and this a tyre wall.

This shelf (points to shelf) is actually the mesa floor So, it's only tires from their up, and the earth shelf is just plastered earth cliff. All the way around onto there, and that's a floor on tyre wall. But this room is like a really good example of just like the early, simple, method of doing this. And we just buried it, put good insulation on it. I'll get into the roof, slopes and all of that more with water, tomorrow. But you can see that this room is designed by... the phenomena. We need the sun, the sun is from the south. The sun is not from the north, or the east or the west, the major heating sun is from the south, so the building opens up to the south, and it's a pocket that stores temperature.

And... so, that's the early rationale for how these were built, the material to build them out of. And it's like always when we look at the tyre situation, we're killing a lot of birds with one stone. We're getting rid of a product, that's a problem. And we're providing us the building material that is, like I say, indigenous to the entire planet, and it's low-tech and people can learn how to do it. When... when it addresses that many issues, it starts to have... extreme validity, let's say.

So the component that we're doing these with is a mass component that has all these other attributes. Like I said, If I've found something better, I would be using it in a heartbeat. But I haven't. So, then we bury in, and this building is a good example of that. Well... Then we've ran into a... You know, this is just the structural thermal side of this. The power, water and sewage side of it even gets more complicated in terms of what we've ran into.

We've ran into a... like an extreme situation, a room like this could get down to 60°(F~15,5 °C) And... I was fine with that, you know... 60°(F~15,5 °C)with no fuel, whatsoever, when it's like -20 °F(~-29°C) outside, I'm like... That's a success story to me. I actually got sued because there is a... there's.... a regulation, let's call it, in the... in the codes, that says that: '41 inches (~104 cm) of the floor, a building has to stay 73°(F~23°C) day, night, winter, summer.' That's a regulation, that's in the codes. And... of course, all buildings are set up to do that that's the way the engineers designed the heating systems. And... what they don't really... what they haven't faced there... is that if the electricity goes off or the gas goes off... that 73°(F ~23 °C) goes away.

But as long as the electricity is running and the gas is running, they can maintain that, and engineers design buildings that way, and so, I've found myself in a whole different realm here... Okay, I can't maintain 73°(F~23 °C). I can keep it between 60(~15,5 °C) and 80(~26,6 °C) with no fuel! And so, I had to get to court, and... I'd tried to explain that to the judge, I said: 'You know, what if the power goes off, the electricity goes off and the gas goes off, that 73°(F~23 °C) is gonna drop drastically.' You know, in certain cases like in Maine a few years ago, the... the line... the ice was on the lines, broke the lines... People were without power and there toilet bowels were freezing, they were gathering together in a... gymnasiums and armories and things like that... with forced heaters, propane heaters just to stay warm, the houses were worthless, not usable. So I said, you know: 'Your Honor, what if the... if the power goes off and the gas goes off, that 73°(F~23 °C) is not gonna happen. Here... yeah, we have a lower temperature 60°(15,5°C) as a low and 80°(26,6°C) as a high, but it's gonna be there, no matter what.' Judge didn't buy it. So I got fined, and everything...

The judge in that case, this was... I don't know, 6 or 8... 8 or 9 years ago, may be, but... The judge just wasn't even willing to talk about the possibility of the power failing or the gas not being available. So, you know, we were wrong, we were fined. So anyway, that caused us to take this very simple thing, and make it more complex. And it did make it cost a little more, but, in a way, was a good thing because now the corner cottage building, which will on be the tour, I don't know who's staying at now, but... In it... is pretty much new off the line, not even totally, totally finished in terms of landscaping. And it's obsolete. But that's what, you know, happens, I mean like... We're... It's evolving really fast. And because we're just keep learning more. We probably... We're using the corner cottage design for the new education facility next door that the governor’s paying for.

That's an interesting situation right there, because when I got more and more trouble with these regulations... and... They took my license in New-Mexico 5 or 6 or 7 years ago, something like that... And then... A year ago the governor gave me 300 grand to build a building to illustrate this stuff. So it's like: 'What am I doing wrong here or what am I doing right?' Whatever... *laughter* I call it getting served shit and peanut butter on the same plate. *laughter* But the... And it's always that way. *laughter* So... anyway, as a result of that we... The corner cottage pretty much... There's a little, tiny bit of education in how to run it. But if you run it right, and it's very little to know, Corner cottage stays 73°(F~23 °C) pretty much. I'd say.... may be it as low as 70(~21°C), may be as high as 75(~24°C), or something like that. But anyway it takes that range of temperature that used to be 60(~15,5°C) to 80(~26,6°C), and brings it real close to the law.

And of course a judge would agree with me now. They would say, you know, if you can keep this building... you know, within 8... or so degrees of 73(F~23 °C) without fuel! Then that is a success story. But 10 or so years ago they weren't buying that. And so we... but it what it is launch us into taking this... 'science', let's call it, a little further. So like the... the early sections then. What I'm getting in to do is to understand why these designs are the way they are, and... Because, you know, people come here to ? or build these for a living, to build for themselves, to share the information, whatever. And it's really important to know why we're doing, we're not just doing these because they look cute or whatever. We're doing them this because... we keep founding more and more ways to fine tune this encounter with natural phenomena.

We're encountering the sun and we're encountering the thermal mass that's in the earth. *cough* And the thermal mass concept. So what we have then is a... a section, we used to just have the tires, you know, stacked up, and... and here we have a roof like this and like that. We've evolved out of that due to the... I'll talk more about that in the water situation. This is the angle in this building, this is the angle of the winter sun to bring the winter sun in here. And even on corner cottage I believe we still have this. We do this roof slope to let the sun melt snow before it evaporates. But we've evolved out of that. So, this was our configuration 10 years ago, well the configuration... now has evolved, we've got a way to melt the water with the sun. So now... See, this makes details and expense.

END OF PART 1

I hope you had a good read! If you would like to watch this then below is a link to part 1. Enjoy! Stay tuned for Part 2, coming soon!

Earthship Seminar Video 2009 - Part 1

Did you know, I built four Earthships in India as well as being instrumental the creation of the first Earthship in the UK, Earthship Brighton. If you are also on this path and would like to read my story, I have recently published a book. It is not only a great story, but a valuable resource for you to learn from. I had no experience or training when I embarked on my mission, but managed to successfully build a gorgeous home called Earthship Karuna.

You can buy this book with Steem on the homesteaders co-op. Whilst you are there please do have a look at some of the other proudcts as there are all kinds of great things there!

https://homesteaderscoop.com/product/earthship-chronicles-ebook/

If you don't have any steem you can also buy the ebook and paperback on amazon.
http://mybook.to/Earthship-Chronicles
or
https://www.amazon.com/Earthship-Chronicles-sufficient-luxurious-experience-ebook/dp/B07MYCBXYB

 

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