How many of you would live at a home
built with old tires and recycled bottles and cans. What if that same home fed you collected
and stored clean water and powered itself with sustainable design techniques? It doesn't sound so bad. Does it? Well today you're going to step inside
one gorgeous and self-sustaining earth ship home, and learn all about the methodology
behind building this efficient alternative house. It's a very simple concept,
grabbing what you want, getting rid of what you don't want.
The building itself is a machine. It doesn't need any inputs from
a human being or a utility to make it operate. You control the
utility. You control your life. You control everything about it. This house heats and cools itself. So this is just an encounter with
the natural phenomenon of the earth. This is one of the two
cooling tubes that we have. This tube is about 20 foot long and it
daylights to the inside of the house. This makes up our convection
engine, our air conditioning. So heat is trying to leave
the greenhouse in the front, but it can't leave in a vacuum. So it has to pull air from out here
and it's going to be cooled through the earth and create that engine
of cool air through the house. So it's our air conditioning underneath these pavers is probably
about several hundred aluminum cans that we just smashed
up and dropped under there. So they're buried in tombs
for the rest of time. So instead of throwing
them in a dump somewhere, it really turned out really nice. This house is about 50% reused,
recycled up cycle materials, and about 50% new perfect
things are just thrown away and we go dumpster diving for them. You know start liberating
things from other build size, you know, just scraps that they're throwing away. So this house is a conglomeration
of stuff we could find for free. We have a tire wall in the back. 10 of us, over 14 days founded
about a thousand tires. 90% compaction full of dirt. These tires are just to rid of
tires on earth, bearing them anyway, might ass well burry them in a house for us.
They're a container to hold mass Snow melts off the roof into cisterns of
water gets used three times underneath my feet. Here are the
two 1700 gallon cisterns, which supply the water to the house. This water will feed into these
cisterns will go into the house. It will be filtered and pressurized
and send throughout the house. Houses today. They require a
lot of inputs. Here's your power, here's your gas, here's your water sewer.
You know, utilities are brought in. And so we pay for those and we have
no control over the price of those. So that's part of the
reason that got me into, was I was living in a
home that month after month was a $1,200 propane bill and electric bill. And it just went on and on and
on and utility bills. And it's a, it's just too much money. So I
started looking into, well, you know, what can we do to lessen this? It was really built for couples to
come up there and just busy lives. Get out of it, come back to nature,
walk outside, take a breath. Look at the stars, recharge Everything here is pretty much
just put together largely by what materials we had. You can see the
actual wood here. This is shiplap. This was on another
construction site in town. They had a bunk of this material
and they said, take it. So we did. So that's what the outside
of the house looks like. Uh, same with the metal
free construction sites. The glass here obviously is not free. This glass dimensions are 10
feet high and about five foot, eight inches wide. Other than that, you can see the high operable windows
that makes that convection engine from the tubes in the back. That hot air is escaping high cause
heat rises and it's strong enough air low from outside into the house. And
that's what cools it down in the summer. So we have slanted glass in this house, and there's a few reasons
for the slanted glass. And number one is on December
21st on the winter solstice on a sunny day, the sun is
very low in the horizon. It's going to penetrate
a largely horizontal. And so it provides less reflection off
the glass and more into the building. That's number one. Number
two is on June 21st. The summer solstice sun is very high in
the sky and it's going to drop straight down and it basically hits these planters,
which we'll see when we go inside This room has many functions. So this
is obviously just a mud room. Again, take off your boots, put
your skis, snow shoes, whatever you're doing for the day. And
you can set them in here, fishing poles, whatever you got the woods storage
for the fire in the winter. This room also acts as a buffer zone.
This house has no heating cooling system, no HVAC whatsoever. There's
no thermostats in the house. There's nothing to move up or down. So this is the first buffer zone
that buffers the outside from the inside, where humans are. So
that's what this room is for. The greenhouse does provide a buffer zone
again from the outside to where humans live on the inside that keeps the
outside out and the inside in. So we've got four panes of glass from the
first two panes here to the second two panes there. So we were four panes
of glass out from the outside. We grow all our own food
here. The greenhouse, the planter cells are a
little bit immature right now. We're just getting started takes about a
year to get them up to maturity and get them overgrown and really
just chugging gray water. So there's about 400 gallons of
water under here at any given time. And that water is being supplied
from the bathroom sink and the shower drain. So all that water is
emptying free flow in here. The dirt in is cleaning it
and the plants are using it. And then the palms are taking it back
to the toilet bowl when you flush a toilet. So the water that comes into the toilet
bowl may have looked like it has a little dirt in or something. It does
get filter, but some debris remains. It is just coming from the dirt.
It's nothing else. The floor is, is the main concentrator
of grabbing the heat. We do have insulation underneath
this floor, two inches of blue board, and we decided to insulate that and
to take all the heat, basically not, not store share with the earth so
we're not giving or taking. We're just being this room
is also a great hangout room. You can relax, you can
read whatever you want to do. So what we have here is a
black double diamond bar, and you can see the black double diamonds
is ski sign is the most extreme area to sit because this is where
the cocktails are served. And we decided to put this bar in
because it serves a couple purposes. You can relax out in the
area. You can talk to people, cooking and have some
cocktails. What have you This window generally is
closed during the winter. And it's just on struts
that open and closed. This panel right here is for really fun
lights in the house. They are unmarked. You'll have to wait until dark
and walk around and find them. So right next to the black double
diamond bar, we have a living wall. This living wall is pretty fun because
we have so much water underneath all the time. It's on recirculation and we
have an independent solar panel that recirculates it's a pump and runs through the living
wall about 10 minutes every hour. The thought on this is we'll
have strawberries growing. You could see some
actually growing right now. This will become more mature as time
goes on as well. Uh, down below you have, uh, some Mant and some things like that. For fun things to put in cocktails while
you're sitting here and grab from the living room. You'll notice the countertops countertops
were done by a friend of mine. John Cross from geo matrix. He makes his own proprietary mortar
mix with recycled glass aggregate. So it's really funny. He also
did the cabinets. So it's pretty, streamless all the way through.
Here's the range. It's a gas range. The kitchen is fully stocked. You have
everything full size refrigerator, freezer range, tons of storage.
You have everything that you need. So the kitchen and living space
is connected is one large room and tons of places to sit and relax. And
you get yourself in a couple of chairs. I do have a television on the
wall. I hope you never watch it. My property manager did make this, uh, this piece here with the
grinder is fun to watch. Now it's the side table for some
of the furniture we enjoy it. Here we are. In the bathroom. It's a one
bedroom, one bath home, again, recycled glass aggregate countertops. We also did the same with the
shower phasing and all these steps. All the stills in the house are all
the same bathroom is very spacious. it has a two head shower
system, beautiful shower area. Yeah. Just opposite to the bathroom is the
reveal room. It's also the utility room. What we have going on
here is the actual tires. So you can actually see
what the tires are about. You can't see him anywhere in the
house. So this is the reveal room. This is also where all the water comes
in from the cisterns, from the berm. It comes through this
water organization module. It goes through filtration
and gets pressurized up here. And then it's sent throughout the house. My friend, built this
bed locally here in big sky. He builds furniture for a and harvest
all this wood material in the forest and he makes beautiful
furniture out of it. Instead of having another piece of movable
furniture, we built this, Armar in, you'll see just a lot of barn wood
accent. You can see it here. Quite frankly, it looks pretty cool.
And it's upcycled materials. So all, you'll see a lot of barn, wood
accents, really fun in the house. We also have a bench in here. So we have a side table that we built
in and a comfortable bench to sit on and relax and read a book or whatever
you want to do. Additionally, I do have the fancy lights, which
I'm carrying the board here. And I promised I wouldn't show
you any, but I'll show you one. You can see this impressionistic
artwork. Unfortunately, I did it. And so if you don't like it, you
probably ought to close your eyes. It was just too hard to tear out
and do again. So we get what we get. This is lone peak, which is 11,166 feet. It's our local ski
mountain here in big sky. The walls underneath all
this are Adobe walls. So that's over the tire walls and
what they are is sand straw, water, and clay. And so we
just troll all that on. And I took a six of us, six
hours to do the entire house. So just really organic walls, as opposed
to paint and hazardous materials. I really just want people to understand
that you can, you can live like this. It's not difficult. It doesn't cost any more or less
than a home in their area per square foot. You're going to
go work all day long. You know, you want to come home, do
something that takes care of you. That will always take care of you. No matter what life for
me is unbelievably good. Thanks for watching this week's video. Make sure to like share and subscribe
and check back next Friday for an all new video.
