Posted By zehboss on 10 Feb 2011 07:26 AM
Hey,

[quote]I strongly suggest that you do not avoid permits in today’s world of satellite images. Many states and counties have imaging programs that compare historical images to current images with image analysis, automatically finding new buildings. Code officials can be your biggest enemy if you are not careful.[/quote]

Thank you for your suggestion, i will also consider this.  How much can they fine you for building a "green house" without a permit?  We will be growing food in it.

Earth ships are neat buildings but very impractical if all the labor is not free or if you value your time at all. Our experience with tire wall construction was that each tire takes 15 minutes to fill and compact and another 15 minutes to finish. You use about 2 tires per square foot of home, which works out to 2000 tires for a 1000 square foot home. The next problem is the time spent recycling of bottles, cans, and tires. This can take another 500 hours for that 1000 square foot home. That is 1500 hours of labor just for walls. Walls constitute about 10% of the time in standard home construction project or about 6 minutes a square foot. That means you are investing 15 times as much labor in the walls as compared to a normal house or 1 ½ times the labor to complete an entire standard home. The next issue is the nonstandard materials and inconsistency of those materials and the few engineers that are familiar with the materials and using them in a structure and that are willing to design with those materials. I have been building zero energy homes since the 70s. I am an engineer and have studied, engineered, designed, consulted on and constructed many zero energy homes. I have recently worked out a way to build a home that performs as well as an earth ship. It costs less than a standard home, takes less labor and delivers a high quality home. If you are interested you can contact me at email [email protected] or you can see my website at http://www.zehtalk.com/ . I am still working on the site.

Brian

Thanks for the information, that is good to know.  What do you mean 15 minutes to "finish" them?  2 tires an hour is very bad but if i have a POUNDING PARTY i could do possibly 10-20 an hour so maybe in one day i could complete 10-20% of tires needed.  By finishing do you mean leveling them and making sure they are the correct dimensions? 

As for bottles and cans we have been collecting them for years so we are good on that.  We have more bottles than cans, so i am going to start drinking more coke :-D. 

The walls may take 10% of the time to build a house but they are arguably the most important part besides the floor or roof.  Like i said, if i can build walls for "free" i want to do this.  I am trying to do this project as cheap as possible.  The cheaper i make it the more "pods" i can make and the more money i can put in the house and garden. 

The problem with the engineer may be justified but right now this is the only way i am thinking of building a wall besides straw bale.  I just checked out your site it looks interesting.  I will contact you soon!  Thanks so much for the informative reply!

Straw homes should be made with wheat straw.  Do not even consider using hay because it is subject to rotting.  The rule I use is that if an animal will eat it, then do not use it because it may rot.

Can you give us examples of domes that sold for more than the standard homes in that area at resale?

Beastmaster-

Some friends here in Colorado built an earthship house with lots of glass on the south and then the rest built into a hillside with tires for the sides and back wall.  They were thrilled to get the tires for free.  They were less thrilled to pay $1 per tire to get rid of all the tires that they could not use once they found out that to make a wall, they could only use tires of fairly uniform size.  The completed house is an energy monster, with one reason being that there is no insulation between the tire wall and the living space.  Another reason is that they are not experienced home builders, which would have allowed them knowledge of previous failures.  If they were satisfied to live at the ground water temperature of 52 F, they would be OK, but getting the house warmer takes a lot of fuel due to losses to the ground.  Further, the top of the back wall is at ground level, and wintertime ground temperatures are much lower than the ground water temps. near the surface.  They are now trying to sell the house.   

Ground water temps. in the D.C. area are around 58 F, so plan to live at that temp., or figure out how to insulate a tire wall.  Also make sure to compute overhangs on the south side to reduce heat gains during those hot, sticky summers.  It would be nice to be able to dump heat in the summer into the cooler ground, but you would need to be able to switch off the heat transfer in the winter.  

I would advise talking to somebody in the area that has built a successful tire-wall house, to take advantage of their learning curve.  

Lee Dodge
www.Residentialenergylaboratory.com
in a net zero energy house