How to make a Rammed Earth Wall

hello there i'm manisha from ananda permaculture project and i'm here to tell you a little bit more about ram dirt construction now if you haven't seen our first video on what is rammed earth building then i would suggest you check that out before you come and watch this video now ram dirt is basically a wall made out of earth which is rammed into place till it takes the shape of a wall right because we ram it so much it becomes quite hard and compressed and remember that we have added some stabilizers and aggregate in this earth so that it sort of sets quickly over time now some people add cement but what we've done is we've added lime and we've added normal gravel or what we call bajri in hindi uh as the aggregate in this earth the interesting thing here is that this entire earth has been excavated from our site itself right so we've built water tanks because we believe in harvesting rooftop rainwater and when we were digging uh for those water tanks we actually got a lot of earth out and that's the same soil that we've used to make our walls now you may wonder like how the hell is this wall standing right and i remember when i first heard of ram dirt walls i thought like one rain and they're just going to get flooded away but the way this works is that we actually create a shuttering with two sheets of ply and some tools to hold the two sheets of ply together now those tools are a pipe like this which goes through the ram dirt wall and then this threaded rod is actually put into the pipe right and on both sides of the wall this is then uh sort of tightened and a pipe of this kind of look i think this is a one and a half by three inch kind of a pipe is fixed on either side to actually hold the structure together i mean sometimes people can't believe that how much of outward pressure it exert so you need to really hold that pressure so just the pipe won't help so you need some structural members as well now when that structure and that framework is all put into place then we take the mixture which we have actually mixed earth and aggregate and lime and we pour it into this framework 12 centimeters at a time [Music] once we've made a layer of 12 centimeters we start ramming it with the help of you know tampers or what we call in hindi as duramud just keep pounding it till you start hearing a metallic sound when you hear the metallic sound you know that this has now got compressed enough compressed for you to move on the 12 centimeters of earth gets compressed down to about nine centimeters and then it is time to put the next layer of earth mixture on top of it and start ramming it again [Music] the next day itself we actually de-shutter the wall we take out all these screws loosen the plywood and remove it and what you will find is a wall like this and with a little bit of knocking these pipes metal pipes will come out leaving behind these holes right these holes can easily be repaired by putting in a little bit of the same mixture into that hole and then taking a hammer and just tapping it back into place so repairing the wall is very easy and it's best done the next day itself one of the main differences between brick and mortar construction and ram dirt construction is that in ram dirt construction we have to plan first and execute later in a brick and mortar construction we tend to execute the wall first and plan later because we can always make a you know a cut in it a hole in it we can break up some part of it even if you want to put a window in it you can sort of you know uh knock down a few bricks and put in a window but in a ram death wall you cannot do that so here planning is of utmost importance one must know where the electrical pipes are going to go and where the plumbing pipes are going to go well in advance so we wanted to integrate you know the electrical pipes into the rounder so we ended up so that means you have to really plan ahead you know you need to see where you are you can't do any juries or you know this is a regular practice and to train you know our electrician or our masons to do that and then also to be really careful when they are laying it that it has to be at the right point the pipes you know you need to you need to kind of think in advance and and put the bend at the right moment and then just leave it there for uh for the electrical box so all that all that needs to be planned in this kind of when we're doing an integral lambda like this one must also have an idea of where the windows are going to be are placed and where the doors are going to be placed we came up with this idea where we can actually insert like a wooden piece into the edge of the wall so this is the edge of the ram desk wall and if you notice this one is about two and a half inch by two and a half inch wooden piece and obviously the wood has to be you know certain quality it won't be like prone to termite or you know it has to be dry enough when the shuttering is removed we have a wall with a piece of wood embedded in it and that's the wood into which we screw in our door and our window frames where electrical pipes are concerned we need to place them within the wall at the beginning and then when you de-shutter the wall you will see the bends of the electrical pipes are showing and finally with plumbing pipes you have to again embed them within the wall and you will see them popping up from the top of your ram dirt walls so that's really how a ramrod construction works and you can do it in any shapes and any forms by just uh altering the shape of your shuttering you can make the form work in any shape and you all you're doing is you're putting the sort of loose material and you're you're tightening it so the walls the junctions don't need to be like perpendicular for example you know so you know these are 19mm ply pieces that have been laser cut to that exact angle and then these vertical pieces that join it together and then we have in between we have a metal sheet which which is the one that actually touches the earth so rest of the process is very similar you know have these threaded rods and the nuts and bolts and the and the pipe in between to hold it together so i hope that this actually peaks your interest a little bit and you consider building something which is more sustainable like a ram earth wall which is likely to last about you know a few hundred years and also self regulates the temperature which we'll talk a little bit more about in another video so that's it from us today and if you are interested in uh sustainable architecture then do subscribe to our channel and follow this playlist called how to build a sustainable house we'll be putting out a bunch of videos around natural earth construction water water harvesting lime plasters and a whole lot of other technologies which we've used in our house to make sure that we live with a very very small carbon footprint thank you for watching bye [Music] you

Channel: Aanandaa Permaculture Farm

Views: 165,250

Keywords: permaculture, farmaanandaa, permaculturedesign, #beautifulfarm, permaculturezoning, #farming, #agriculture, #foodforest, farminspring, permaculturefarminspring, aanandaapermaculturefarm, manishalathgupta, foodforest, permaculturecourse, permaculturedesigncourse, permacultureeducation, permaculturetraining, beyondorganic, sustainable, adaptandgrow, permacultureindia, natural building, rammed earth, sustainable architecture, natural homes, energy efficient home, earth architecture, sustainable home

Id: AO8Cqk598wY

Length: 9min 36sec (576 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 17 2022