Earthships: The homes of the future

The first of 3 parts I want to deal with in this body of thought is the concept of Earthship biotecture. It is fundamentally for me the most important of the 3, although not taking anything away from permeculture and food forests. They are pretty damn close and certainly in my mind interrelated but being human starts with having a home, a shelter. The quality of which is going to determine the quality of that human or human family's life. So if you live in tin shell that cooks in summer and freezes in winter your quality of life will be low and this will permeate to your output in this world. If your basic needs are met by your home then a burden is lifted from your shoulders and have the freedom to finally live and not just fight to survive. So what is Earthship biotecture? It is the brain child of architect Mike Reynolds who over 40 odd years has been developing to my mind the only sound way of becoming carbon zero. He rejects the term architecture and calls it biotecture, I think because of the connotations those words have. Architecture suggests an architect, a person that designs a building in accordance with his own will and aesthetic. Design choices are made to suit that of a client and to impress the traditional establishment, to seem innovative and cool. I don't look down upon that. In fact I am still a great fan of modern architecture. I want to make the point though that this is not how biotecture functions. There is an element of aesthetics which I do find fresh and exciting but mainly biotecture is driven by how the available resources provided by our surroundings (i.e. rain, solar light, solar heat, gravity, earth, plants and animals) can be harnessed to suit our basic human needs. Thus biotecture could be seen to be something like a carriage, a tool of our own making that makes use of an available draft animal to transport us somewhere into the future. Most importantly it does so without the use of carbon, that is use of fossil fuel, being tied into a grid, no water pumped to the house, no human waste pumped away to be treated, to electricity supplied to the house so no need for coal or nuclear power, no need to go to a mall to buy food. An earthship is 100% environmentally sustainable and independent of outside assistance. This is the ideal. I think the only true way to be 100% sustainable and independent of the outside would be to live in a tepee in the desert somewhere but earthships are as close as it gets without having to sacrifice modern comforts. So what are our basic human needs? We need a clean source of water. We need food. We need security. We need community. Earthships as a philosophy can provide it all. First let me deal with specific issues of the earthship design. As I have said, the earthship are shaped the way they are not to be aesthetically pleasing but to harness resources. The first one I will deal with is temperature. So the earthship is made up of about 800 or so old tires that are rammed with earth and stacked on top of each other to build a thick outside shell of the home. The use of recycled materials are important in earthship design because they are low cost and available. These rammed earth tire walls provide excellent thermal mass to keep in the winter sun's heat and keep out the summer sun's heat thus the temperature in earthships usually range about 21 degrees Celsius year round which is the perfect room temperature for humans. Modern buildings for the most part have failed to address temperature fluctuations adequately for the most part I think because there was this assumption that you can burn fossil fuels when its too cold and you can use electricity (in the form of fans and air conditioners) which is in abundant supply when it is to warm. So that meant builders could get away with building ever decreasingly dense walls. These days I'm surprised how thin our walls have become, and how little regard is given to keeping in heat. homes are drafty and very poorly designed. Old homes that did not rely on electricity were still built with thick thermal mass walls but these days profit comes into the picture at the cost of your comfort. This however does not matter much if you are rich enough to fit the bills but the damage is still done on a universal level. 7 billion people tied into that grid of dependency. Earthships don't need air conditioners, or fans for that matter or heaters or even fireplaces even if they are in the tropics or in cold temperate climates like Norway. They capture the heat from the sun through passive solar gain and retain the heat from the sun though use of thermal mass and thick insulation. Another need, water is supplied by rain. If you live in an area that gets about 7 inches of rain per year or more then it turns out you can capture your own water. This is nothing new, but the earthship are designed to capture every last drop that falls on the roof and feed it into build in cisterns. This water is then filtered for different uses. Filtered 4 times for drinking. Filtered 3 times for showering and washing dishes, normal household use. To get hot water the water is pumped to copper pipes on the sunny face of the house and stored and then it is then pumped to a on demand propane heater that regulates the temperature before its ready to use. The propane gas is only used in the event of rainy days where the water does not warm in the copper pipes No chemicals in the drinking water, no chlorine, no fluoride. The shower and washing water is then sent as grey water to a grey water holding cell in the greenhouse area of the building where it is filtered by your edible plants and then sent back to the toilet to be flushed as black water. When you flush your toilet this black water goes outside to a septic tank and then is released into another external garden to be filtered. Thus the same water is used for 4 different purposes. This cuts down on water usage and means you can use the water not only to drink or shower and wash but also to grow your own food in your own home. Electricity is supplied by solar panels on the sunny side of the house. These panels are connected to storage batteries so you would have power even when the sun is not shining and can be further connected to wind or hydro power if you have it available. The power is converted from DC to AC so that you can run any modern appliance you would choose to, including TV entertainment centers and computers with internet. As I mentioned you will have a greenhouse which sits within the home itself. In fact it faces the sun to capture all the solar gain and then feeds into the house during winter where thermal mass stores that heat and acts as a buffer during the summer cutting off the sun's rays from the interior section of the house. This is due to the difference in the sun's angles during winter and summer and the positioning of the windows for the green house. The green house then has the other function of being the place where food is grown year round. Due to the warm humid condition of the green house one is able to grow tropical fruit and have fish ponds even in places where the temperature drops well below zero in winter. Additionally it has ventilation pipes going though the back of building where the thermal mass sits that can send cool air into the house and warm air out via ducts in the greenhouse during summer. This acts like an air conditioner because that air is drawn though meters of cold earth before it enters the home, unlike how we draw warm air in though windows in modern buildings. these can be shut during winter. If it still gets hot during summer which I doubt I would think it possible to play around with that air and having it flow across a body of water before it enters the building given that the cistern sit at the back of the building. You could have a system similar to Persian wind catchers which rely on a tower drawing out warm air (in this case the ducts of the greenhouse) and a qanat, a passage of water under a building over which air will pass into the building cooling the building by up to 15 degrees Celsius. This system has been used in the arid climates of the middle east and Persia for thousands of years. No need for electricity. I think it would be possible to have the overflow from the cisterns enter in a small passage at the back of the building before it exits into an exterior reservoir. The passage would hold water and allow warm air from the back of the building to pass over it cooling that air before it enters the building. Not sure if this cooling would be so drastic as to render the home uncomfortably cool during summers so a way to divert the air to this passage might be an idea. It can be used those times when the home really needs more cooling. So there you have it. A home that can provide all your basic needs without any need for paying utilities.