Incredible Small Off-Grid Earthship Home

one of the things that I love about architecture is that there's always somebody ready to take things to completely the next level in terms of radically sustainable design an Earthship is a great example of that and today we've traveled to Adelaide in South Australia to visit the region's very first council approved Earthship [Music] get anybody can I Bryce get to meet you mate yeah you too welcome this place it looks like something out of a science fiction movie doesn't it it does a little yeah now there's a lot of people out there who I'm sure have never heard of an Earthship before what is an Earthship exactly okay well an Earthship is a off-the-grid building made out of natural and recycled materials it's a bit like a spaceship or a sailing boat there has to be all self-sufficient doing everything for itself with its power water and sewage it's also called an Earthship because it uses a lot of earth in its construction earth being a very sustainable construction material so that's a good thing and also you have to kind of sail the earth ship a little bit thinking about you know when to open and close windows and doors and vents to make sure you've got a nice comfortable indoor temperature the thing that inspired this project was really the work of Michael Reynolds who started this earth ship thing back in the 70s and 80s he was experimenting with this stuff and one of his books was what got me really thinking that perhaps we can do something like this I always probably a little skeptical that we had the resources and the energy to pull it off but yeah totally supportive of the idea and I don't know at what point along the way I fell in love with it but certainly the end result he's worth it yeah now what you've done here is really cool as well because you've taken this earth ship concept but you've kind of downsized it haven't you yeah yeah well it's actually based on one of Mike Reynolds designs he calls it the simple survival model earth ship and he developed it in response to an earthquake in Haiti so yeah I sort of took my lead from that design and made a few little changes just for our Australian climate dealing with things like bush fires and slightly more extreme heat so it's just a little demonstration Earthship to try and get people excited and exposed to this idea of earth ships so what size is this one this one is about 70 square metres so the main living space is about 25 the greenhouse is about the same 25 and then the bathrooms 10 and the entry is also 10 and so how did the earth ship itself come about I went over to America to visit Mike Reynolds and his earth ship and I actually went and learned to build I did their internship for a month then I just really wanted to come back home and start doing it so if you look on this property you'll notice there are little tire structures everywhere we've got what we call the chalk ship up there which is a little you know chuck house made out of tires and I started a rainwater tank that I never finished out of tires and didn't take too long for me to go now I want to actually do something more substantial and one of the real interesting things about this project is that this is actually the first council approved Earthship in Australia there are a few projects similar to this that went before but they didn't go through the council approval process and I wanted to really show that you could get council approval for something you know a building as unusual as this you know using all these strange construction materials and I guess the other part of the story is it became a bed-and-breakfast because we already had our straw bale house we weren't allowed to have a second dwelling so instead of a dwelling it's a bed-and-breakfast you scratched on it before that one of the main things about an Earthship is it being completely off the grid and you can really see that with this one a the top of this home looks like a soldier ready to go into battle it's totally loaded with off-grid tech can you tell me a little bit about all that well one of the great things about the Earthship is that it is so energy and water efficient that you don't need too much tech hopefully so there's only a one kilowatt solar array on there and also there's a solar hot water service and skylights and things like that for ventilation and yeah so there's a lot happening on that roof absolutely and then on this side of the roof it's really unique as well because it looks like you've just kind of got these banked Gardens going into a gravel roof that's part of the Earthship thing is that behind the building on the south side you have this Bank of Earth that's called an earth berm and what that does is provide really good thermal stability into the building because it's sort of like it's you know almost like an underground home and they're really renowned for their I'm very nice stable indoor temperatures but of course it's also very bushfire resistance so the gravel on the roof apart from it being a wonderful filter for the rainwater that we catch off it it's also non flammable you know it's not burning a bushfire absolutely so this gravel is actually acting like a so how does the rainwater collection here work yeah you can see at the back that's sort of like a box where all the water that falls on that roof there's a rubber sheet to waterproof the roof so after the water passes through the gravel it hits the rubber sheet and all drains to a box and from that box it gets split out to bury tanks means they last longer the water is kept cool and there's all sorts of benefits to putting the tanks there one of the things that completely enamors me with the whole Earthship design though is aside from all of the cool off-grid tech and all of that stuff they're just beautiful aren't they like everything that's on this one with it's almost kind of elven architecture and then you've got the greenhouse at the front it just looks so unique but gorgeous at the same time yeah I agree with you on all those things another thing I really love about is the symmetry of it like when you're looking from the front of it there's this beautiful symmetry to it I'm not sure but I suspect one of the intangible things that makes people love the Earthship is those curves like it's so different to the usual sort of boxy shapes that we're all familiar with so yeah I think the curves are what do it for people should we go and see if those curves are continued on the inside let's do that all right let's take a look come on in Bryce thank you this is the entry room and it's also a little utility room so in here you've got a battery bank about 14 kilowatt hours of batteries so I think something like the tesla powerwall was about 10 kilowatt hours so a little bit bigger yeah and that's the old-school wet acid battery type technology but it's all very low maintenance in fact it's a zero maintenance I've done nothing to it you don't need to top it up with electrolyte or anything like that the next room over here is the greenhouse so you come and check out the greenhouse oh now this is seriously killer it's like having a forest in your living room isn't it it sure is yeah I feel like it's the most beautiful part of the Earthship a really unusual thing to have in a home really to dedicate this much space really to an indoor garden but it's a really multifunctional space so it's a really important part of how we regulate the indoor temperature in the living spaces back here it's also a place where obviously you know there's all this beauty but you can grow food in here we harvested about 100 bananas off one of these banana pumps here in winter so I'm sure that was a world-first for you know bananas up here in the Adelaide Hills gets pretty cold here in the winter so yeah it's this beautiful indoor gardening space where you can garden all year round also another amazing part of this is that it is a wastewater treatment system so the idea is that whenever you have a bath or shower you can harvest that grey water by directing it into this garden bed it's essentially a wicking bed with a layer of gravel at the bottom that fills up with your grey water and then wicks up through the soil to the plants roots another cool idea is that once the water has passed through this garden bed it's actually been cleaned up and he's clean enough for toilet flushing so you can have a pump at the end and use that to flush the toilet I did have trouble getting approval for that ultimately I got told in the end that I was a very naughty boy and I wasn't allowed to put the grey water in here anymore okay if you have a look down here under these pot plants there's a little plumbing box and this is the valve that I was told I had to remove but essentially it enables you just by turning the handle to direct your great water into this garden bed or you can direct your grey water out into the septic tank which is of course the normal thing that would happen and it's a wonderful system that worked well for a long time before I was told I had to remove the valve yeah what a shame though that the council wouldn't actually let you do that because we just drove through about three days of drought stricken Australia to get here where people are really trying to hang onto water and then here they're just like no waste it's got to go in the septic it just seems so short-sighted to me to not allow people to experiment with clever utilization of grey water yeah I couldn't agree more Bryce it was really frustrating to be told no you're not allowed to do this but yeah I hope that one day these laws will change because we we kind of know it's not a health hazard sometimes I really think bureaucracy is just gonna kill us all yeah oh great yeah that's right and I mean I suppose the amazing thing about this project is that that was the only sticking point whereas there all these other things like the tyre walls and you know the bottle walls and things like that so I guess I'm thankful in a way that I didn't have more problems fair enough - and talking about the bottle walls they look stunning in here don't they yeah yeah I'm pretty pleased with the bottle walls for such a tiny little Earthship it's got a lot of bottle walls they take a lot of effort to get looking nice and I'm really grateful to all the wonderful people who helped me build this Earthship because some of them showed real attention to detail really put their heart and soul into it now as much as I love the idea of including a greenhouse within your home does it just cook in here in the summer well thanks for that question Bryce because that's the question a lot of people ask and the answer is not really so typically what will happen is it can be 40 plus degrees outside and surprisingly in here it's cooler so it'll probably be about 10 degrees cooler than outside and I've kind of put that down - the Sun just sort of bouncing off these double glazed windows at the front so that helps keep things cool and also yeah just all the thermal mass in the living space and the floors out here that really helps to keep it cool because it's all tapping into the stable cool temperature of the earth underneath the building and you being completely equal to my level of architectural geekiness you've actually graphed and monitored all of that haven't you yeah that's right yeah I could show you some some graphs if you want you'll notice throughout the building little temperature sensors here and there they're actually recording the temperature every half an hour and I've been monitoring the temperature now for two or three years and what I'm finding is it is you know a remarkably energy-efficient building and also there's another really interesting thing I'd love to show you in a minute which is the underground earth tubes that actors like I'm a free conditioning system I'd love to check that out okay cool so where is that hiding that's back in here okay okay so this is kind of a little maintenance hatch down to the earth tubes it's like a little cellar so there are actually two tubes down there they're about 250 mil in diameter and they're about a meter deep although as they go down the hill they get deeper down to about two two and a half meters deep in a big trench that we dug one day it was actually a really warm day about 40 degrees and I measured the temperature on the bottom of the trench and it was 13 degrees so that really shows the stable and cool temperature of the ground at that depth and that's what these earth tubes are really tapping into so as the air passes through them it changes temperature to that stable temperature of the earth so what I do is I usually keep this closed and I use this little cupboard here which has a grill in the bottom this is where the air comes through into the home so I can close this off if I don't want too much cross ventilation and there's also a little sensor here which is showing at the moment that the you know the air is coming through at about 17 degrees it's also got the air speed it's really important that the air moves through slowly if it comes through too quickly it doesn't have time to change temperature and so what I'm finding with this it can be 40 degrees outside and the air coming through here is 20 degrees so it's much much better than opening up a window or something like that and in the winter it warms the air up so it really is just like having a free air conditioner it's a free air conditioner yeah that's so clever you're gonna put some companies out of business with that one and then of course that has brought us into the living space of the Earthship nicely done and all sort of you know just a very open plan room isn't it yeah it's it's intended to be very multifunctional so the bed here that's a futon bed that can fold away to a couch so I'm often Zoe comes down here and does yoga with a few friends so we can use it as a yoga space sometimes I just set my laptop up here and you know get work done here and yeah there's a little kitchenette over there also this cupboard that some regulating the air flow for the earth tubes that's also designed as a bench seat so that yeah it's got a little bit of storage in it as well and of course they see the fireplace over there in the corner lovely addition yeah yeah and also that's multifunction as well because apart from you know the heater provides and the cooking function it's also boosting hot water system so if the solar hot water system is not providing enough hot water you can light the fire and within a couple of hours you'll have lots of hot water standing in this room it actually feels almost a bit like being in a cave doesn't it this beautiful earthen floor and in the cool roof design can you tell me how all this came about yeah I think I mentioned before that this was built with lots of wonderful volunteers and could not have done it without them for example this roof structure it's made out of lots of reinforcing bar you know steel bar with sort of like a chicken wire type mesh on it that you use as a as a laughs to plaster a cement mortar onto so yeah that was built over to the side of the Earthship and then lifted up by about 30 people who were here volunteering to you know help build this earth ship and when it was landed on the top of the tyre walls here these walls are made out of about 700 car tires filled with compacted earth then we poured a concrete beam on top of the tires that really helps to lock that roof structure onto the wall structure makes it all super strong and then spent a few days just plastering lots of cement water onto that wire mesh structure so that's what's giving us this beautiful vaulted or shape and it's been finished off beautifully again by the volunteers with a lime render and then whitewashed or lime washed then you've got the beautiful earthen render on the tyre walls and then that meets the earthen floors which is essentially the same ingredients that are used to make the or the other earthen wall renders it's just sort of the clay that was from our site and it's the same on the floor but the floors a different color because we've got a linseed oil finish so multiple coats of linseed oil that soaks in and makes it waterproof and not dusty feels nice to your bare feet kind of thing and then what is through that door over there ah that's the bathroom you want to go check that out let's check it out all right so this is the bathroom Wow and hear that bottle wall just jumps out if he doesn't it it really does yeah and at certain times of the day you know as the sun's going down to the west there really jumps out even more I bet now this bath is beautiful is this on the catalyst you quite right Bryce that is Tallaght and again that was something that some wonderful volunteers did there was a couple of them who had experience with tattle act and they thought the elders how to do this waterproof plaster is what it is and it's an ancient Moroccan technique that was used and yeah it's really really beautiful and in the shower over here and of course you've got another bottle wall as a feature behind that yeah there are bottoms just everywhere and was probably a little bit ambitious to have a bottle wall in a shower recess because there's some waterproofing issues and things there but I think I managed to solve those problems you probably wouldn't usually see a bottle wall and a shower recess but I think yeah you can see now some beautiful light coming through that and yeah look it's it's been quite serviceable when it's working well you've got a washing machine as well y and also a flushing toilet yeah the flushing toilet probably deserves some explanation because you'd probably expect to see a composting toilet you know you know more ecological building but we thought for the Earthship we'd stick with that serveth shipowner principle of trying to use the grey water for flushing but as I said before unfortunately local regulations don't let us flush with great water so it's a bit frustrating and what's through here okay so this door we have a little outdoor area so we go out a couple of chairs and a table lovely space to stick you out in the Adelaide news and what a place just to take in the view and all the wildlife I'm sure out here as well there's some beautiful wildlife often there's you know a little family of kangaroos down there munching on the grass and sometimes they're joined by some cows and koalas and wedge-tailed Eagles yeah we've got it all here and I guess one of the other things that we have to address is the cost because this is such a unique project earth ships are incredibly labor-intensive can you talk to me about what this actually cost to build it cost about a hundred and seventy thousand Australian dollars to build that doesn't include a lot of the labor that the volunteers brought to the projects we'd already built a straw bale house a few years ago and I do remember vividly halfway through that project standing at the front thinking could we sell this unfinished and so second time around building the Earthship there were points where it I think we both thought this is too much it's too hard but we've got there in the end and it's worth it so yeah there was there were many times we felt like God things are going too slowly and you know this is too hard and all that kind of thing but yeah you know you just keep chipping away at it and you get there in the end and yeah it's been a good experience yeah you learned that by persistency and you can get there in the end well I really love the finished result of this home one of the things that just jumps out to me is that it is completely functional and packed with all this very sort of clever building technology even if a lot of its natural and innate technology but the result is just as beautiful as it is functional thank you so much for sharing it with me Thank You Bryce what I love about earthships goes so much further beyond the cleverness of all of the design and the technology that goes into making it all possible it really just comes down to the fact that they're beautiful and ultimately building beauty into our home is one of the most important things that we can do in a place that we live [Music] you

Channel: Living Big In A Tiny House

Views: 4,773,754

Rating: 4.9032884 out of 5

Keywords: earth ship, earth ship documentary, green living, off grid, off the grid, off grid living, tiny homes, michael reynolds, tiny earthship, earthship, earthship homes, earthship documentary, earthship house, earthship construction, earthship tour, earthship biotecture, earthship build, earthship greenhouse, simple living, off grid house, small house, small house movement, small house tour, self-sufficiency, solar power, sustainability

Id: V1UjbmksKYI

Length: 20min 28sec (1228 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 13 2018