Each time I work on one of these I am sure that it will be easier than the last time, not so yet. Summer is continuing to be in full swing complete with out of state license plates, no seats at the Merc (a most popular restaurant around these here parts) and long lines of people most everywhere you go.
The Earthship building is moving slowly but surely. We have poured the concrete slab. This required many hours of prep work before the actual pour. We laid down a vapor barrier, 3 inches of foam board insulation, 4-140 foot runs of pex tubing, one layer of metal mesh and miscellaneous rebar all over the place... Then the concrete trucks arrived and it was a crazy couple of hours. We started with 3 people and had 6 by the end of the pour. Then it started raining(of course) and my husband and a friend stayed up till 5 am trying to get a nice finish on the pad. They ended up putting up a visqeen tent over the entire house and working with the headlights of their trucks all night. Luckily, I came down with a cold and was sent home after the pour. When my husband arrived home, he was covered head to toe in concrete and was soaking wet. But it's in, and we can now move forward again. Sometimes this process seems like a lot of hurry up and waiting. The gravel and concrete pads were two BIG steps in the building of our home. Now, comes more of the fun stuff. Tire pounding will be resuming and we will start to assemble the post and beam part of the south wall.
Before we move on however, lets talk about the concrete pad some more. In the Earthship books, they recommend putting your flooring on the ground. They have formulated a mixture of the naturally occurring soils that they use like concrete. However, here in Alaska that would be a cold floor! The temperature of the ground here is around 40 degrees where as in other places the temperature of the ground is more like 60. Many homes in Alaska(and probably other places) use warm water/glycol circulating under their flooring to achieve a comfortable environment. This is a more passive form of heat than say a monitor or forced air heating system, it also is more efficient as your are heating a mass that holds heat longer. It seems to me that our culture is so bent on heating air and keeping it hot, that we forget that people(and animals) have been using thermal mass to stay warm for as long as well, time.(Think lizard on a rock, cave dwellers etc) I also find heating air to be an apt metaphor for our lifestyles in general. We spend so much energy on making money to pay our bills which keep stacking up, all the while spending less time with our families which leads our children to believe that they have to go to college to get the highest paying job they can so they can support their families when the time comes. I have recently been learning more and more that "opting out" is a possibility. If we look at how many hours we spend every month on each bill(ex. food bill 700$ 35 hours @ 20.00$/hour) , I think we would see that those hours could be spent on growing food... Which expenses are necessary? That is up to each individual person. I think we can all find things we could opt out of. If we as a culture decided to simplify and reduce our needs, many of which are a necessity of the 40+ hour work week and the convenience lifestyle, I think it would be beneficial.
A closed loop under floor heating system will be one of our houses forms of heat. The water/glycol(we're not sure which yet(any input is welcome)) will be in a closed loop system that runs a couple of laps in the masonry stove. The masonry stove will be our other form of heat. Once again an ancient technology, a masonry stove is a big pile of rock with a firebox. When you burn a roaring fire for a small amount of time, the rocks hold the heat for up to a couple of days. If you were to hire someone to build you a masonry stove, it would cost thousands of dollars, but the concepts are pretty simple. One of the reasons for the high cost of manufactured masonry stoves is that the materials are often shipped. And who wants to ship a big pile of rocks anywhere? I have yet to travel anywhere that didn't have rocks, so this seems kind of goofy to me. I am going to leave off for now and keep working on the house, We'll see you next time!
