Impressive Straw Bale Home & Dream Family Homestead — Sustainable Green Building

foreign [Music] started out just wanting to you know move into the country and wanting to build uh ecological home you know energy efficient using natural materials a little bit of a homesteading project trying to grow a certain amount of our own food you know and heat our home with the trees from the property and managing the forest in a sustainable way being stewards of the property my wife Christine and I and my son mola we all live here and living here just being in nature is just you know such a treat and even to a point that it's hard to leave and I think also the satisfaction of you know harvesting something and then using it and creating with it is really enjoyable but to sort of live off the land so to speak you know is work but it is a labor of love and it has you involved in the cycle of life it's hard work I think it's one of the things that keeps me feeling healthy so you know after 18 years since we started this project it doesn't feel like a burden at all it feels normal the materials for the home we wanted uh you know this to be a healthy home so to have good indoor air quality um with no off-gassing so we've used a lot of you know natural wood finished with natural oils we've used natural paints all the walls are finished with silicate based paints so they're no VOC paint we have some clay finishes on some of the walls the Earth and Floors was one of the elements that we wanted to test out so we did some little bits of that as well as a light clay straw wall system and you know Stone all these kinds of things so just minimizing the amount of plywoods and particle boards and all those kinds of things yeah and then you know the straw bale walls are again another complement to that natural materials you know with straw obviously a completely renewable resource and we live in the country you know the straw that we use for the house was produced by the farmer up the road and uh yeah it was it was a good match the straw bale wall system is essentially a straw bale full with straw bale that makes the wall from inside out and it's got an inch of plaster on each side of it so this hose the straw bales were integrated as an architectural feature and functioned as an insulated wall system the designer Martin leaf ever did a you know a beautiful design for the home and we really liked the idea of having this Atrium in the center of the home as kind of like this nucleus that would draw heat from the Sun in the in the shoulder seasons in the cooler seasons and be available to heat and warm other parts of the home and then have these bedrooms as these sleeping pods idea and and the rest of the home is like the the living pod and yeah it worked out really great the post and beam structure for the house is made out of PSL which is parallel stranded Lumber and that's an engineered Lumber and from an environmental perspective the idea that you can take a whole pile of small trees to create these large pieces of Timber as opposed to cutting down old growth forest or super large trees to get the same size of a of a product as well they're two to three times the strength for their size that also helped in allowing the living roof for the weight I think the the biggest draw to the living roof was just that it was kind of felt like it was the house was like coming out of the ground like it just sort of belonged keeps the house cool in the summer and you know helps maintain the heat through the winter we planted all the stuff on the roof which most of that's still there and things that have come are welcome so things like milkweed and just other plants that found their way up there some golden raw and whatnot that's fine and yeah we've never watered it so this is a you know not an intensive living roof it's more like an Alpine Garden everything's built to try to increase our thermal performance so in general you know the insulated value for the strawberry wall system we're looking around R40 we had learned when we were building this house that thermal mass is an important factor that's actually now been disproven to be the best way to make a highly efficient home however it does have some value you know to have a big window have lots of thermal Mass to take in that heat and slowly release that heat after the sun has gone down for the night because we're heating the home and the shop with the firewood every winter we will cut firewood we select the trees that are either crowded and or sick and dying we use those and any trees that end up being in good good saw logs then we'll put them on the mill and I'll we'll mail them into boards and like in the house all the doors the flooring all the trim the cabinets that we built in the kitchen and in the bathroom is all made from that wood basically this is a gasification wood boiler and in the top here is where you put all the wood and then it's got like a fan and it blows air down through and creates a uh like a high level of oxygen burn for underneath and then that hot air goes through and out four tubes in the back of the boiler which are surrounded by hot water so bringing that heat into the hot water and then it goes into this big tank over here on the side so this is a thousand gallon storage tank in here that uh it's basically like a big water battery so the the wood heat is transferred into the water and then that water is pumped either through the house or into the shop floor so we've got the solar thermal panels and those heat the hot water for the house which is just the domestic hot water so that's just for showering and dishes and what have you all the other hot water to heat the houses from the boiler so through the summer that'll be eight ninety percent of the hot water we need and in the winter it's just the um preheat for the water because the sun's not out as much through the winter we have a dug well which has a limited amount of capacity so minimizing our use on that is is important so you know with the composting toilet we're able to you know prevent that extra water that's needed to flush waste down the toilet and then just with the gray water being able to take all those nutrients and feed the plants so whereas a regular septic system the whole idea is you know is to try to get rid of it make it go away but everything that happens here can be here and it can stay here so our septic system is a composting toilet and the gray water system working together and we don't have a septic tank and so we use natural soaps and you know we don't use bleach all of our water from our showers and dishwater bathtub laundry goes into a holding tank in the basement and then it's pumped into irrigation Chambers the planter beds so this is one of the planter beds here this will treat half of our gray water and the other half will be treated outside and we do that through the warmer months and then in the winter all of it goes outside just because the indoor air moisture was um uh you know was getting a little bit too high the composting toilet that we have in the house is a clivis maltram and so it's a vault style toilet and this is the Vault right here and the toilet's right above the toilet's nothing really unusual um this is this big Chute down from the toilet I'll tell you the really great thing about this toilet and that is that it's always got a fan sucking air from the toilet down so there's never any odor in the bathroom so that's a real bonus so the urine and the poop comes down goes in here but we mix it with wood shavings so every roll of toilet paper we put about a coffee tin size container of wood shavings in this is the working end of the Vault and this is the Raco spot here so once a once a month the cone as they call it gets raked out and that's it that happens there this is the removal hatch down here so the composted material is removed from that and then there's the the liquid that can get pumped out here into another tank that can then be used outside for fertilization it takes a year or two for the material to go through the whole process and for it to be composted so once a year I'll remove about half of what's in there and that'll go you know a couple wheel barrels full and then that goes out and I'll spread that around some of the ornamental trees and so for non-edible plants there's zero water for flushing um though there is a Mist that goes into a over it to keep it wet and to keep everything happening so once a day it puts about a liter or two of water over it as a Mist but that's just once a day yeah very little water so when we started the project we had a certain amount of money saved and we went to you know starting to build and work and doing it a lot of it myself you know I didn't have to pay for that labor and what our idea was was to not borrow the money from the bank but to get as far as we could and then as we continue to generate income over the years to then complete the parts of the house that we could so you know that made the project take longer but it was just another way of doing it where you know we didn't have to depend on the bank and it just sort of gave us a little more time as well to you know try different things yeah so when we bought the property um there had been a trailer here so that was great because we had the hydro was already here and there was a well and a phone line but aside from that it was just basically you know wild with some grasses and what have you so it was a great spot to establish a house and set up the gardens and stuff it was great because we had this Southern clearing in the so we could get all the light and stuff from this little nice little sheltered Nook when we bought the property we imagined growing a lot of our food we have apple trees we have grapes concord grapes raspberries there's hazelnuts you know in the garden we've got our garlic and corn and squash potatoes onions lettuce beans so you know and then we'll freeze and can Christine's really big on canning so get that taken care of and then we've got the chickens um which is great because we get all free range eggs as we call them and um and with the greenhouse it just adds a little length to the growing season so we can get you know some vegetables a little earlier yep so cucumbers and tomatoes and peppers all in the greenhouse our Greenhouse is uh irrigated with rain water from the roof of the shop and uh yeah we just collected in these uh in these tubs and I mean rain water is great for plants in the first place and and then just you know reduce the amount of water we have to pull out of the well [Music] challenges you know can come and I'm always trying to calculate risks and make sure that you know we're not going to get ourselves into a position where it's not going to be good a good outcome so yeah I think just planning that's what you know avoids the challenges as much as possible when we went to build this home we didn't know that much about straw bale construction and at that point in time Ben Paulie and harvest Holmes was one of the companies that could do a straw bale wall system we got on really well so after that all happened I went to work with Ben and ended up as a part owner of evolve Builders Group which is the general contracting company that we built together we're doing Straw Bale Homes rammed earth homes passive homes Sometimes some timber frame homes so you know maybe building the kind of home we have isn't for everyone I mean there's lots of things that people can still do and I I think passive home is probably a good spot for people to jump in and you can do that without having a rural property you can build a passive house anywhere passive house is a building system to be able to get the house to perform at a level that the furnace can go away and you can heat with a very small heat Source I don't know the exact numbers but reducing the amount of energy required by around 70 percent and there's no guesswork so that's done in a very calculated way you know to me now looking at you know what we've done I think that's a good way for this industry to be moving and I think it's an easy jump in point for anybody who's interested in building a home that is going to be better on the earth and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and you know contribute to fighting climate change [Music] subscribe to exploring Alternatives and check out our playlists for many more videos like this you can also find out more about evolve Builders Group and their green building projects on their website thanks for watching

Channel: Exploring Alternatives

Views: 292,302

Keywords: green, building, straw, bale, walls, ecological, natural, low VOC, healthy, modern, homestead, home, house, solar, hot, water, wood, gasification, boiler, garden, composting, vault, toilet, greywater, grey, treatment, plant, bed, greenhouse, attached, atrium, Evolve Builders, Exploring Alternatives, Chris Vander Hout, thermal, mass, debunked, paint, earth, floor, stone, PSL, clay, earthen, family, experience, story, documentary, sustainable, lifestyle, living, build, built, self, growing, food, rural, utopian, passive house, passivhaus, 2023

Id: WW12_UWsBaA

Length: 15min 29sec (929 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 22 2023