Earthship
Filed under
Building
What are Earthship homes?
Earthships use 6 basic design principles. They are built to generate their own power, harvest water, treat and contain sewage and are heated and cooled without using any kind of fuel. Earthships are built to be small self contained eco-communities, from growing your own food to harvesting rain water, these weird looking homes are changing the way people live.
Additional Information & Resources:
I think a picture you posted is not showing there is a big white box under this text of the post…
-Todd
i like this idea and would like to learn more.
thank you.
rory
No mention of Insulated Concrete Form homes? Besides R-50 insulation value and a 4+ hour fire rating, 6″ (or more) of reinforced concrete provides significant ballistic protection. I built one a couple years back, about 15% more per sq ft, but worth every penny. Other bennies are its air tightness and sound proofing. I’ll never live in a stick/brick house again. ICF is the fourth little piggie’s house.
I was originally going to build an earthship. I even started littering my property with tires. Some good concepts, but too many drawbacks for what I need. After much more research, I decided to go with an earthbag structure. Rocket stoves, humanure, solar/wind power and permiculture are all part of the plan for my property.
there should be more knowledge available and more government incentives for these. great for so any reasons.
@lonewolf,
the last thing you would ever want is to have the gov’t involved in any of your affairs. the less of them, the better for you.
You’re absolutly right bubba, Im currently active military deployed in Afghanistan, and let me tell you the less the government knows about you and your business, not to mention taxes on every f’n thing, the better off you are surviving the real American dream! There’s not many real Americans out there any more. Everyones plugged into the system and needs the government for survival, including me; but not when I do my 20 and retire. Cut all tie’s from the uncle sam and live off this beautiful country of ours!
WOW NOW THAT’S REAL RECYCLING AND IT’S NOT SOME CREEPY WEIRD STUFF. As long as it doesn’t have some kind of weird religious belief system I’m into it. I’m Christian and prefer to be. This doesn’t even give them any money if you use stuff out of the dump and so on. I think my husband would think i’m nuts howeverI like technoolgy, but I would like to have a polace where I didn’t have an energy bill at all. I’m tired of funding this weirdstuff where everybody get hurt. I’m a globalist, but I’m into globalization only and mainly using it to spread the Word of God. I’m conisdering doing something I never thought of too. I’m about to upadate my ocmpsutre storage from 3.5 disks and cd’s to sticks and chips (YES I’M OLD SCHOOL AND I’M WAY BEHIND!!!!!) NUTS!
It sounds like a nice idea, but unless you live somewhere that building permits aren’t required (not many), you will need a building permit.
There is nothing in the building code that would allow you to build this without hiring an engineer to design it. It would also need to meet energy & ventilation codes.
If you build without a permit when one is required and you get caught, you may be facing double permit fees, you’ll still have to get it engineered, and probably inspected by the engineer. Then you may have to incorporate any engineered fixes that are needed. Worst case, you may have to tear the entire thing down, or the building department can do that for you (for a fee of course).
Believe me, it is much easier & better to do it right the first time.
I know that there are some anti-government people here, but the building codes were developed to safeguard life & property… and they do… your life, your families life, the lives of visitors, and your property.
I’m a retired building code professional, and have had to deal with many people who built structures without permits and got caught. I had the displeasure of telling them the bad news. Sometimes things couldn’t be fixed and had to be torn down.
Also, building departments are pretty “slow” nowadays, and they need sources of revenue. Do you know that the compliance folks where I worked had the most amazing satellite imagery program. It put Google Earth to shame. You could practically see into the windows of peoples homes. Yea, they have time on their hands to look for illegal structures now. LOL