Living Off Grid in an Earthship-Style Passive Solar Home for 10 Years + Full Tour

foreign [Music] I tell them I live in an Eclectic Hobbit house I've been living here at Twisted Oak off the grid for over 10 years now I raise my children here I homeschooled them and I just love living off grid I can't imagine living any other way it makes me feel so much more connected to Nature and the patterns of the seasons and it just brings so much joy to my heart I've been living here with Christina now for about six years and I can say living off grid is everything I thought it was going to be and more and that Christina built this house as well as she did really is the reason why it works so well [Music] my journey and my inspiration to build an off-grid home really started years before I designed and built this home I was living in Seattle and working as a structural engineer in the residential building industry and I was seeing the way homes were constructed and I was horrified to see the amount of waste they created and they just weren't that efficient so I decided to just throw myself into learning more about alternative ways of building homes so I took every course and seminar I could take and I read every book I could get my hands on when I had the opportunity to move to Colorado and build a home I knew I wanted to build a passive solar home I wanted to create a home that was safe for my kids no matter what the weather and the other goal was to be financially sustainable which meant I wanted to build without a mortgage so that meant that I sold my house in Washington and I used the proceeds from that to build this house and the land that I chose to build the house was on a slope and so I knew I wanted to burn the house into the hill and that way I would have a house that could never freeze because it would take advantage of the ambient temperature of the earth which is about 55 to 56 degrees so it could never get cooler than that so I built the back wall out of recycled tires that are pounded full of dirt now the rest of the house has a bunch of different kinds of materials all the plasters were Earth plasters just made from dirt some of it just left over from pounding the tires and the outside was covered in a lime plaster which is absolutely gorgeous it's about a year to build Twisted Oak and I had some wonderful help it was just like all this magic came together and all the right people showed up at just the right time when I met Christina I was so inspired by what she had done because she took that Earthship idea and really made it workable made it beautiful and it was just inspiring to me on top of that I had been attracted to a simpler off-grid lifestyle for years and my whole being was just drawing me toward this kind of a lifestyle I had about 20 years building experience and I had worked with many alternative materials including straw bale Earth block and I actually moved here to help a friend build the first Earth Ship that was permitted in this County this house cost about what I was expecting it to cost to build and we were able to save a bunch of money by not connecting to the electrical grid because up on this land it would have cost a lot of money to bring in electrical power to the house from the grid and we're able to save a lot of money by not building a well and using water catchment and I saved a ton by incorporating a composting toilet and a gray water garden and that eliminated the expense of a septic system so this is our entry room air lock it's a place where we can take off our shoes and hang up our jackets and our hats it also serves as a space between the heated or cooled part of the house and the outdoor space and this is our great room this is where we spend most of our time and one of my favorite features of Twisted Oak is our gray water planter that is incorporated into this great room it runs along the south side of the house and it collects all of the water that runs down the kitchen sink the bathroom sink the tub and the washing machine and it takes all that water and runs it into this deep bed of gravel and then it's topped with soil and that allows me to grow tropical plants inside year round in the desert our kitchen is like every other kitchen it has a standard propane stove a sink with hot and cold running water and our refrigerator is a 24 volt DC refrigerator so let's move on to the throne room and the bathing room so this is like a structure within a structure I literally had this castle built inside to create the throne room and the bathing room and this is made out of adobe bricks that came from New Mexico and this also acts as thermal Mass so that keeps the bathing room always nice and warm or cool in the summer in the throne room we have our composting toilet and we chose a composting toilet because water is really precious here in the desert Southwest and we just didn't want to be flushing good water down a drain the other reason is that a septic system in our location would have been very expensive and this is our bathing room complete with a clawfoot tub this room was originally my boy's bedroom and now that they've moved on and they have places of their own we've converted it to our office space and it has a lot of storage as well to get up to The Loft you have to use this little ladder slash staircase and this is the laundry space and as you can see we have an off-the-shelf front loading washing machine we don't have an electric dryer an electric dryer would take a lot of power and I just didn't want to build and pay for a solar system that would incorporate an electric dryer and I really like hanging out the clothes it gives me a chance to just take a break from whatever I'm doing go outside be in nature hang out the clothes and just reset one of the things Christina did really well in this master bedroom is she Incorporated a lot of storage and she was thinking she might end up meeting somebody like me and need an extra closet this bottle art masterpiece is really a demonstration of the talent that came my way while I was building this house there was a young man who was a snowboard instructor and he came to work with us mostly as a laborer and we put him to work building this beautiful castle wall and it was quite a challenge to create this Arch and this curve at the same time and gave did a beautiful job and this really has become kind of the crown jewel of Twisted Oak so this is our systems room and what we have here on this right side is our water heater which is a solar water heater it has thermal panels up on the roof this is the controller for the thermal panels This water heater does have a propane backup so if there's no solar gain to heat the water the propane system will kick on and heat our domestic water we have a 24 volt system we have 1.2 kilowatts of solar panels on the roof charging our batteries which are right behind this wall and then the charge controller charges up those batteries and the inverter changes that 24 volts DC to 120 volts ac f after the inverter the house is basically just wired like any other house 120 volt house so we have circuit breaker panel right here even though we only have a 1.2 kilowatt solar system we have all the power that we need we don't do without we watch movies we have our computers we just live an abundant life we use passive solar design to heat and cool this house all that means is that we use the placement of the house the placement of the windows and the overhangs over those windows to control how the sunlight enters the house based on the seasons so in the winter when the sun is low in the sky the sun just floods through our windows and heats up this whole Space now in the summer the sun is really high in the sky and so the eaves over our windows can block that sunlight from entering the house and that keeps the house cool so in the winter we want to keep this house warm at night even after the sun goes down so the way we do that is by incorporating thermal mass or really dense materials is all that is so the whole back wall of this house is built out of tires and they're pounded really tight with dirt that makes great thermal Mass so that thermal Mass absorbs all of that heat coming in during the day and then when the Sun goes down at night then that heat radiates back into the house keeping it warm we also use passive cooling it's really easy where we live because we live at 7 000 feet altitude and it cools off here at night so as we open the skylights and open the windows warm air rises out goes out the roof and the cool air comes in through the windows and we just get beautiful passive ventilation through the house so those two principles passive Heating and passive cooling make this house comfortable year round we do use a wood stove for our supplemental heat but it is just supplemental we may wake up in the morning on some of the coldest days of the year where it's 60 degrees in the house and within an hour an hour and a half it's 70 72 degrees in the house when the sun comes out it just warms up in there so quickly and we go through maybe a quart and a half in a whole year here in our area drilling Wells is really a challenge and the people on this mountain who have drilled Wells don't often get good quality water so they end up hauling water for their domestic water anyway so I chose to just incorporate a water catchment system so we catch all the water that we use in the house on the roof and that water just flows off of the roof into a conventional gutter that then runs through a pipe that dumps the water into two concrete cisterns from our cisterns then we have a gravity fed into that systems room where it gets filtered and then it gets pushed into a pressure tank from that point our house runs water just like any other house does in addition to that we do treat the water in the tanks occasionally with a small amount of bleach but then we further filter the water at the sink through a very high quality carbon filter when I met Christina this whole front area pretty much looked like the driveway it was all gray gravel and then over the last six years this has been a creative evolutionary project we started out by getting help from a friendly neighbor with a tractor who helped us move rocks around and we talked about things and we had little bits and pieces of ideas that we'd put together and as it evolved it became this beautiful space that we just loved so much [Music] some of the realities of living off grid snowfall is a bit of a consideration we do get snow here a couple of years ago we got like six feet over a period of about three days and at that point in time it's pretty easy for us to get up onto the roof but it requires a little bit of shoveling anybody who lives in snow country has to deal with that and also I do the snow plowing for us and for Christina's folks who live about a quarter mile away just next door to us but that's relatively easy and not a problem for me yeah and when we do get a several Day storm we do have to watch our power if we haven't been bringing in a lot of solar power then it is time to you know maybe not do a load of laundry or not watch a movie on the big screen but I use this to my advantage when the kids were at home because I made it an excuse when we had a storm for them to read a book or to play with their toys and it was a way for me to control their screen time one of my passions is inspiring and supporting people who are interested in off-grid or sustainable living so a few years ago I wrote Twisted Oak a journey to create a self-sustaining life and home which is our story about how we created Twisted Oak after writing the book I was inspired to create a website as a One-Stop place for people to find the information that I wish I had had before I designed and built Twisted Oak and you'll find videos on off-grid living as well as our travels and our van Clarity on our YouTube channel Clarity off grid we plan on living in this off-grid home until we can't till we can't the house is built on one story it's very simple it's a very agent Place designed home yeah there's no steps there's no stairs you know it's all easily accessible one thing I did was I made sure that I could get up on the roof to clear off snow off the solar panels you know very easily it doesn't even take a ladder and I made sure that all of the windows are accessible to wash from standing on the ground so I don't even need a step stool to wash the windows so little things like that I hope will make it easier for us to stay here as long as possible subscribe to explain Alternatives and please share this video if you liked it you can also follow and find out more about Christina and Matt on YouTube and on their website thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Exploring Alternatives

Views: 582,961

Keywords: off, grid, off the grid, passive, solar, home, house, design, recycled, tires, retaining, wall, burm, earth, ambient, temperature, thermal, mass, panels, hot water, rainwater, collection, roof, greywater, garden, filtration, no septic, Exploring, Alternatives, Clarity Off Grid, living, lifestyle, book, channel, sustainable, green, natural, building, materials, eco, winter, four season, woodstove, retired, couple, earthship, inspired, tour, interior, gardens, growing, food, story, interview, documentary, micro, snow, heat, cool, systems, 2023

Id: RM5izEs7KEg

Length: 15min 51sec (951 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 03 2023