Boots on the Ground: Why doesn't everyone build with rammed earth?

[Music] [Music] so about a decade ago I switched to becoming a sustainable builder and what gives me hope now is how much things have changed in those last 10 years this group is evidence of that we have come so far and and we've done it by going together that's absolutely awesome ten years ago when I said that I built rammed earth so I would get what you do read what and they wouldn't couldn't even hear what I was saying it was so alien now most people that I talk to say oh yeah I've heard of that sort of like straw bale right well no but you've heard of it that's cool and now they just want to know how to pronounce Erik Kira well you know I can't do everything I've been having people come through my house over this last decade and we now have regular four times a year tours what I'm about to share with you are some of the comments and questions that we have had over and over we get hundreds of people coming through and we've heard certain questions and comments so many times I'm really starting to get a good database this one I'm going to share with you comment number one almost everybody who walks in the door has this in some way they expressed this was not what I was expecting I don't know what they were expecting maybe it was a mud hut maybe it was a hobbit hole I don't know but the reality blows them away this is a beautiful light filled space that anybody would be delighted to live in I would say that 90% of the people who come through the door put their hands on the wall at some point I'm lucky if they ask I've had people I've caught people I come around the corner and they're hugging my walls little creepy but I think some of the people who ask they're looking to find out how stable is this well it's incredibly stable every once in a while I'll get somebody and they find a little place and they kind of go home look I got three grains of sand coming off this and I said yeah congratulations that's you know three games of sand this week and maybe there was one grain of sand that somebody else got off but the last true but keep rubbing you know if you're lucky you'll get another grain or two it really is incredibly stable and it's not like I'm sweeping up the sand it just it's actually the cleanest house I've ever lived in and this is the most shared Instagram picture that we've ever done because of this lovely myth loose where'd it go this lovely mistake anyway very cool that we don't call mistakes we call character man this one I get from everybody and well it's the easy comment you come in to somebody's house of course you're gonna say it's beautiful but there's this total surprise what's beautiful well yeah you've seen the pictures you come through the door you've been on our website you just checked out our Instagram I know you've done all these things why are you surprised oh yeah we get this one a lot so just like concrete right no no it's really not it's not made like concrete it doesn't even look like concrete and it does not act like concrete this is a completely different substance it's not brittle because it's made from a chemical process its ductile it can absorb a bullet and not crack in the middle-east you want to hide from everything that's going on you go into a rammed earth building and I've had that directly from vets who've been there it's also sustainable in comparison to concrete we'll get back to some of you know how sustainable it is and and some of that but keep in mind that this is not concrete one of the biggest things about it is that it is incredibly durable substance and that's part of what makes it very sustainable so how is it made well it's dirt it is subsoil and it gets shoveled into forms and compacted with pneumatic tampers until it's back to stone really simple process as long as you do it right it's just like nature does this top one that's nature doing it over you know maybe a few million years and that's us doing it over a few days and it's a little bit stronger than Mother Nature I went and started rubbing my hands over a mother nature's rocks I get a few more than that one or two or three grains of sand oh how does it stand up Canadian weather well we all want to know that we just had a tour in February which was a perfect time for it the driveway was a lovely luge track for all the people driving in and the snow and sleet was flying and everybody shivered as they wandered in and then said oh well that's great but they still last how does it stand up to the weather and I think there's a sense that when you hear that earth in the rammed earth you think all that's going to erode like earth I actually did a YouTube video which you know you can check it on our website that is it titled why does rammed earth not wash away in the rain so I'm not gonna belabor this point you can definitely go check that out on your own but the reality is that our rammed earth because we've stabilized it and put waterproofing agent in is waterproof it does not seem to notice all the freeze-thaw cycles it nothing changes with the rammed earth and then around the globe there are examples of rammed earth that have been standing there for thousands of years in all kinds of climates the Great Wall of China is mostly rammed earth and if you look at even the the least maintained parts of that out in the desert there they get snow they get rain and they were not being built with pneumatic tampers and they did not have any stabilizing agents and they're still standing so I think we're probably pretty good on this one which brings us to well yeah it's lovely and warm in here in the middle of winter and there's that feeling oh you know you have you're hiding your furnace somewhere or your must be burning you must have a wood stove that you aren't showing us no we really don't most of our heat comes from the Sun and it's a bit of a disturbing thought that here in Canada we don't get the thermal mass is a thing that works that solar gain is something you can use for free heat that's there's definitely something wrong if we're not using the greatest simplest source of heat available and there's there's definitely that sense that well if you're going to build sustainably you must be sacrificing something right no way this is the most comfortable permanently warm place to live the temperature stays constant year-round because of the thermal mass all of that rammed earth there is hanging on to that heat and staying warm when the the power goes out we don't even notice until I notice that the microwave has started blinking again and then in the summer we have our summer one-game they come in and Oh lovely air conditioning in here well yeah we don't have an air conditioner there is absolutely no need for an air conditioner in a round earth house those same walls with all that thermal mass are going to stay exactly the same temperature through the summer as well you may find as in this situation that you do get some Sun coming in maybe you don't have it perfect Shadid but you have it shaded enough that only a little Sun comes in because the Sun gets higher you have some overhangs you can limit how much Sun comes in but the Sun that comes in gets absorbed by the rammed earth and then in the night time you open up your operable windows have a nice passive ventilation it cools down the walls and your back to the walls are you know it's about 20 degrees it just stays that way in the summer it goes from both you know 20 to 24 degrees and does that in the winter as well thermal mass it's amazing it's so quiet there's a quality to the quiet and around earth us I know that a lot of you build passive houses and people will comment about how quiet it is in a passive house this is quiet like that and then there's something else I'm not sure what it smells so fresh oh yeah it really does it's not living with that smell of dirt it just smells really nice and partly it's that constant humidity not only what can you fill that bathtub with water and not get the windows steaming up but the guitars stay in tune and nothing says perfect humidity like that what are the building inspectors say Oh everybody wants to know about that actually we found the building inspectors are generally really cool about this and something to keep in mind for all of us is that building officials care about what they do they are trying to improve the built environment as much as we are they just maybe don't have as much information about it as we do a little bit of Education going but obviously because rammed earth isn't in the building code that engineer stamp eases a lot of worries yeah it really is I think when people say that they're trying to put their finger on what it is about being in RAM ders and I I can't put my finger on it easier it just it's a lovely place to be can it be pacifist yeah sure it's Terrell and I actually did a paper at a conference at pacifies conference a few years ago pointing out that the simplicity of the rammed earth wall is partly what made it really good you've got the continuous thermal insulation this goes all the way around all the openings all around corners and there are no thermal bridges it's airtight it's it's the perfect Rambler pass pass wall you can also of course do natural Living Building Challenge has no red list its red list certified and so on that was an interesting one I think that people have a sense that you can only do certain things no you can't it's limited only by the imagination and the architect and perhaps the pocketbook of the client what should we be building with rammed earth everything museums libraries I can bring a mouldy box of books down from the cottage where they've been for a couple of decades leave them in the house for a while they smell great clearly schools community centers let's build healthy for our children for our communities indigenous housing it's from the earth it's building with the land this there's a tremendous connection there and multi-unit dwellings these are the best Ram party walls you've ever seen just to give you a sense of height this is one wall and it starts up here it goes down two storeys it keeps going and it goes down to the basement right there it's a three story while freestanding no problem you can go five stories this is which is what the scale of human existence the acoustics are great we get this from professional musicians this is a ram der studio this is why my husband agreed to let me build rammed earth in the first place as I said I'm gonna build you the best music studio ever and I did it really is quite amazingly good acoustics those guitars that stay in tune also really it's so great you just walk down you pick up the guitar and you start playing we don't have to play that tuning song for the first 10 minutes and when you get somebody on the drums and you get some of the guitars plugged in you can hear everybody the perfect sound separation really cool I think with this one they're definitely trying to figure out visits you know is this really legit and it is you can see that we've been here long enough we're starting to build up clutter but those Randers walls are completely unchanged this one's like oh it's so beautiful they're a little bit surprised that the walls look so much like art but you know by then they've been there long enough see they really know that the walls are beautiful and they do have a lot of character I'd like to live here well it is the most comfortable building I have ever been in Bar None it's also affordable we're living on a single pension income because we can and that means that our energy bill is less than half of the Ontario average it kind of works out you have maybe a little bit higher mortgage to start but not much but wow you're saving on the energy forever these walls have character don't all wells have to be flat and maybe white and featureless and doesn't that just make you want to go out and buy stuff at Walmart and fill the space no we don't do that we just enjoy the walls it's actually kind of funny how often I get this comment but you look at the depth of those walls yeah zombies aren't getting through that but the reality is that we're facing in apocalypse that's a little more realistic than zombies and rammed earth is up for that to the things that we know we're gonna get through climate change floods fires insects I mean we may be losing the bees but the termites are all over climate change extreme weather heat waves power outages mentioned that you want to be in a rammed earth building when the climate crisis gets real this is a big one what does it cost yeah it's not expensive it costs somewhat more to build rammed earth walls than it would to build another type of wall system but if you're gonna build a high-performance house Randers is a fantastic bargain because of that simplicity because of that single crew that comes in and does it all all of those layers that need to be there and are often having to be installed by different people different crews are all done by one crew and it's done you've done everything from the outside finish to the site finish and everything in between and it fits perfectly into any custom building I think that's something that the return on investment that slight bit of extra that you have to pay gets paid back in energy so why doesn't everybody build this way and many many people as they're leaving our house make exactly this comment so why aren't we swept off our feet building hundreds of these every year because the reality is that change and this is different change is hard people find change to be a difficult thing to do but we also know that change is absolutely necessary if we don't change we're in big trouble we all know that that's why we're here that's why we're passionate about what we do and change is happening and we're making it happen [Applause] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Passive Buildings Canada

Views: 23,812

Rating: 4.9223986 out of 5

Keywords: BOG, Boots on the Ground, Passive House, passivhaus, haustalks, haus talks, construction, Green building, sustainable building, rammed earth

Id: N11X_0fJ3w4

Length: 19min 52sec (1192 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 20 2020