Build a Bulletproof Home for Almost No $

rockhopper here and today we're going to show you some super adobe earth homes being built right out here in the california [Music] desert this is jump from the mojave center and he's going to tell us a little bit about this place and what's being built here and how it's constructed super adobe earthbag homes are essentially built by taking a continuous polypropylene sandbag one continuous bag cutting it into links to make each one of these rows and then you fill the bags with earth which is made of sand silt and clay depending on what your soil is you might need to add some sort of bonder to it but the amazing thing about these earth domes is they take very little material to build it's something that all of us have that's right underneath our feet all the time which is the precious earth so you have the bags the earth and in between each one of these bags is a layer of barbed wire that helps hold the thing together it gives you that tensile strength that holds each one of the layer to itself so what's inside these bags exactly so on our property we have a very unique type of soil like so like i said soil is made up of sand silt and clay we have a very very strong silt content we barely have any clay which is the natural bonder which is in our soil so because we don't have any clay we add a cement to each one of our mix it's somewhere between 10 to 15 percent which has the uh it acts as that bonder because we don't have the clay and because we have that you get these rock solid bricks that are made of just the earth and somewhere between 10 to 15 mix of cement some water put it into your bag tamp it down nice and hard and then you get these rock hard walls and this makes for great insulation as well right yeah so uh the one of the amazing things about not only natural building but earth bags in particular is these bags are about 16 inches thick and so you've got this amazing earthen mass that will stop the sun from just penetrating and beating your house conventional buildings are straight up and down and the roof is straight over so you get hit with that sun and it just soaks it up the domes have this really nice shape that sort of refracts the sun over up and over it and also you've got 16 inches of beautiful natural insulation that has straight out of the ground and keeps your temperatures in your dome very nice and cool during the day and then at night we'll release some of that heat from the penetrating sun all day and it'll warm your structure passively at night time and this is an incredibly earth-friendly way of building correct uh yeah i mean for us we have a soil that is not ideal ideally we'd have more clay and you wouldn't have to add any cement to it so we do have some cement there is the polypropylene bag as well but here we're showing what is possible with our soil if you went to your place you could possibly find and it's very likely that you have a good deal of clay and you wouldn't have to add any cement whatsoever but all of the products besides the bag and the cement that comes to us just comes right from the property that we're on right here so we don't have to source these things from far distance it's a affordable product which is the earth [Music] and that's what our property calls for yours might be different and hopefully is so this was the first house constructed on the property and jump is going to give us a little tour let's go on in this place is pretty spacious and uh now we're looking up to the very top you can see the sky there and there are some beams wood beams right there and some more wood there and there over the doorways and you've got windows what will be windows right and this is the doorway we came through so tell us a little bit about this place jump so uh when we got here in uh january of 2021 our past knowledge of earth and building was based in adobe bricks which is you're using the earth and you use straw or maybe even corn husks or not cornhusks rice husks to be that binder but here in the desert we don't have any of those things so we started looking at what other kind of earth building there is and we found super adobe and uh these bags act to hold all those things together so that's what made sense to our property and what we have here um our mission for the mojave center is to bring people to the center to learn that building a home is something that every single one of us should have the ability to do and have access to it's not something that's only made for the ultra rich and that you have to hire somebody and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars you can learn these skills over a seven day workshop with us and take them back to your property so we believe that the structures and having a home is something that every human should have access to for their own survival we also want to bring people here to just see what is possible my i always grew up thinking you know we had to live in a square box you had to hire somebody out to build your house for you i'm 34 years old i started learning super adobe over a year ago and today i've built with probably 300 other people uh now seven different structures so this is something that everyone could learn and take away and do at your own property or with friends on somebody else's property we all should have our homes right housing should be a right not a privilege correct exactly yeah i mean if you don't have a house and you don't have that base for your survival how else are you going to be able to you know move past just trying to figure out how am i going to survive if you don't have a home then you're fighting the elements and you're not actually able to thrive you're always in that like survival mode of trying to figure out every little bit figure out your home and you've got your survival and then you can move into a thriving state of what are all the other things that i need in my life now i noticed this thing over here you were telling me about this earlier what explain what this is right here so this is a a wind scoop if you see on the outside um of the structure it's kind of a natural swamp cooler you've got what sort of looks like a chimney facing in the direction of the prevailing winds here and it's always bringing in fresh air into your structure one of the things that we have in our homes is we don't have fresh air all the time coming into our homes very often it's coming through an ac which is running through some kind of piping which might have a lot of dust and buildup could even have some mold and things like that but this is fresh air that's circulating throughout your property or your structure at all times when this is finished too we'll have a piece on it that you can open and close say you don't want any wind coming in at that moment but so you can close it and this will passively cool your house and bring in fresh air whenever you need it sounds like a great idea and it i felt it myself you can feel feel air flowing through there so tell us a little about the skylights yeah so this is our apprentice dome we had some uh we have each season apprentices that come who want to sort of extend their learning of these earth domes they just got done with designing and building this and part of their design process was how are we going to bring natural light into it and one of the ways with these earth domes is leaving the top open and having a beautiful skylight that brings in a nice natural light you also have these forms that you see right here these will be pulled out and these will be windows as well that will bring in some nice natural light raw copper year viewers might be interested in how well these structures do in super harsh environments one of the amazing things about earth domes well there's a couple things one of them is as you can see each one of these rows like we said has barbed wire in between them and it allows for play and movement unlike a conventional host and beam if you start bending a post and beam that wood is just going to snap it's not meant to move at all these are meant to have a little bit of play and there's been several different examples of where earthquakes have happened and these are the only structures that are left standing there's one famous one in nepal a couple years ago when they had that big earthquake every structure in the entire town was demolished and a project that had gone there to build earth domes was the only thing that was left and it was the center for everyone cut the community coming together and trying to survive now in an environment that had been demolished another thing here in california we have wildfires and they're only getting worse these structures are essentially fireproof it's just earth you can't burn earth actually if a fire came through here and engulfed one of these structures they would actually become stronger because right now it's a clay pot that's just waiting to be put into a kiln and fire would actually make the structure stronger if you had a hurricane the high winds that could come and knock down specific buildings and damage maybe throw something at a building and hit it and knock it over one of the beautiful things about an arch or a dome is uh they don't have singular points where if you destroyed that the whole thing falls apart the way that an arch or a dome works is it distributes its weight across the entire structure so if one little piece got damaged or something happened to it or hit all i would do is take that and send it around to the other side and up and over so there beautiful for survival uh and any environment that is extremely harsh all right we have the mixing process going on right now so this is uh our earth mix like i talked about before we have a mix that goes uh five buckets of earth and then one half bucket of the cement which gets you somewhere between the 10 to 15 percent cement mix and then out comes what we go and then we add into our bags and this is how they begin filling the bags so the dirt goes into that bag and then as you can see it winds around okay hi everybody so uh it looks very simple but there's a lot more to this than beats the eye we have holly here who i actually went to high school with we have nicolette they're doing some bagging right now and so they're taking our stabilized earth mix right here which is a moisten to perfect moisture content a little bit of stabilizer right now they're putting it into this woven polypropylene bag it's a continuous roll and they're just doing it scoop full by scoop pool and trying to keep this material nice and packed so it's loose and um it's just loose material before you tamp it and then after you tamp it as it starts to dry it becomes these really hard um stabilized breaks and the cool thing about earth back building is 85 percent of it to ninety percent of it it's just all earth then if you wanna take a look at our compass system i can show you how we take measurements all right let's check that out so you might be asking like how do we get a perfect circle and it's actually really hard to get a perfect circle but there are some really easy tricks or tips that you can do to make sure that the geometry of the dome is perfect so uh in the middle here we have this center compass it almost looks like a racquetball you mean tetherball starts in a cylinder shape and as we go up we start to curve in and there's two main measurement devices that we use to get this perfect shape the first one here is a center compass pool and then the middle here this measures our radius of our circle and so with this given dome we're making an eight foot diameter so the tight compass is fixed meaning that it's a given length and without getting too technical with it it's actually quite easy you put this high compass on the exterior part of your bag the exterior part of your diameter and then it just measures to the inside of this bag right here um as we go up you can see that this will start to like arc in determine how this how this dome ends up like curving towards the top but we calibrate this one so remember this one's always constant and this one is changes as we go up you can tell that this uh the arc goes up and the circles actually start to get smaller so the radius has to change and so at this given height um the radius will be here which is a lot smaller than what it is down here so these are the two main devices that we use when making an earthen dome you have your center compass and your height compass the polypropylene bags will deteriorate due to the uv rays so the final step is to get the plaster over the structure so i'll be parking it here for the evening here at the mojave center and we have it's uh more coming on this one all right more pizza everybody enjoy that pizza thanks to darian here who made these pizzas where do you want it i hope you enjoyed learning about super adobe earth homes out here in the california desert don't forget to subscribe and give me a thumbs up like all my videos and share with all your family and friends i'm here at the mojave center until next time this is rockhopper i'll see ya [Music]

Channel: Rockhopper Adventures

Views: 382,917

Keywords: super adobe earthbag homes, super adobe homes, super adobe earth homes, earth houses, adobe houses, wilderness survival, sandbag homes, build a bulletproof home, build a bulletproof home for almost no $, alternative house, building alternative homes, low cost homes, tiny homes, tiny houses, cheap living, minimalist living, super cheap homes

Id: wzK1QUHZkKo

Length: 18min 15sec (1095 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 19 2022