Strawbale Home couple built after fire is bioclimatic marvel

it's just a road there'll be a break there we go there we go is this this property oh yeah solar electric car charging before people were really doing it is there a reason you have so many ponds that's Trout Farm it's Trout Farm and what was it when you arrived well it was abandoned trp farm so you had the rock work and the empty ponds and not as much growth but it all burned off in 95 so then there was no growth and so this has all come back it was a moonscape here it was just um a pretty devastating landscape this is a picture of the quester ridge from s Louis abiso during the fire this is a picture of our place we lost our house our one of the cars our pet pig was all was all gone so it was pretty devastating did you have the feeling you were starting from scratch well we had different her reaction was much different than mine mine was sort of the construction and destruction or two sides of the same coin we had just done first straw build building in the in the state that was permitted and we looked at that and said wow that's an interesting thing too bad we've done our own place it's all done you got to watch out what you wish for I guess and then so then we got so this is all strub out which has advantages in terms of fire these benches straw Bell benches were done before the fire and they're the only thing that was left after the fire which Prov the point on that it's more fire resistant which is a contradiction of terms but it's like trying to burn a phone book so we had a chance to redo everything so from the crisis came the opportunity like the and his word right yeah and we have to do all these B buildings and play with them well we'll show you the the house it has the straw bales is a two story bail wall and and so the Bales are just tied in here with these metal plates go over oh yeah and that goes up two stories so these are the Bales and this is the structure yeah that's so we didn't want we got tired of hiding this this beautiful wood inside the B wall right and then it's pain in ass to have to pit fit the Bales between the wood so why not separate them and that's a sort of step to the to the Shell so we should show you the outside of this because you get a feeling of what we can accomplish with workshops that's another advantage of struggle you can do them with workshops it's a communal effort like a barn raising kind of yeah and the nice thing about bail raising or bail Workshop there's something for everybody so the Super Macho do the throwing the Bales up you know catching them up had kids sewing we had a group of old people with bad backs they did this one over here and I think that's the best another advantage of of the bails is most stucco buildings are all cracks all over the place if you notice this wall there's very little crack the reason is the baale has a nice tooth and the stucco can expand and cont trct on its own thing and there bail rides along with it you're not fighting each other like a standard thing so I like this side we call it the old elephant height aesthetic that's what contractor call it why an old elephant hide Aesthetics if you look at elephant hides you know you're not trying to make it straight and and weed whacking it most baale billies they weed whack it and they get it really crisp looking who wants it crisp ch's sake I know I got crisp it's nice that way yeah that's that's what it is it's baales it's not a it's not a a 2x4 with plywood on each side and and drywall and that aesthetic I think I think it's beautiful wall there they're home before the fire was what just this Foundation what's left of the home from before the fire or just the foundation here the foundation you can see that yeah and it has some angles and stuff so before the fire this was our house at three stories here Bell skin custom tub so this is left over this survived yeah in the tub so this was a bathtub or a hot tub or yeah a custom made bathtub for two people so what is left from before the fire all this concrete wall here yeah the concrete wall and the slab you see all the scars what is the shape of your house I mean a fractal shape what fractal shape is it cuz it it's not a square or a angle or it's kind of Wiggles around I'm big on fractals how do you define fractal architecture uh well you're looking at instead of a ukan look with three dimensions and stuff you're looking at multiple Dimensions infinite number of Dimensions between things and much more complexity we're trying to say that all this Wiggly squiggly stuff is fractal stuff more and more difficult for a building well it's the well it's more difficult for building right now because everybody's in ukan thinking there's something to is very pleasing about I guess what you would call the fractal architecture not having a being inside a box yeah like you see it here with the lines and the light and uh it feels good so I had all these all these Craftsman work working on this stuff and one guy is a carpenter standard Carpenter says God damn it everybody's having so much fun here and I am not you're making me do the straight stuff we said take that sofa and do something with the sofa for us and he did that sofa I think one of the nicest pieces here it's a beautiful sofa yeah okay but we were fortunate in have this beautiful wood because it with the fire all this is firewood yes and the ceiling here is cter Pines it's not very strong but it has a nice pattern that's the ceiling here oh the ceiling here oh so see each wood each wood has its own nature this is the sixth pond and the seventh Pond and then the sergeant Cypress Forest starts here and if you look carefully you can see stumps within that Grove and those are ones that we cut down and Mill we realized that all these big stumps of Sergeant cypress trees that had died in the fire were like K dry on the hoof and that they actually had another life and we were able to find find somebody who would come in and help us cut the trees down and then we found some young men that had a mobile Mill and they came and helped us Mill those logs to be able to rebuild our house and office with so this a little structure here using wood that was too Wiggly for the house and I built this little garden shed it's crucially important to know where South is most of our windows are facing the other key to that is the wing walls that Shades in the morning early morning and afternoon in the summertime another aspect of this South facade is that not all the windows go all the way to the inside we have several water wall and Tra wall they're called um the water walls are these low on either end those lower Windows go into tanks of water for warming there's water inside this yeah I'll show you a second you can see better okay so in that winter time Sun's low hates the water radiates to the inside No moving parts so you don't see on the inside on the outside do you see anything well you see a massive cobwebs between the glass thing CU spiders you can get anything it's a tank yeah it's a tank and the glass how do you call the system is a tra water uh we call it Banbridge wall he's the first one that did this the time he's a graduate student at Davis so basically what's happening oh okay the sun's coming in and we got a selective surface on the face of the wall yes in other words black really black yeah and then it's warming the water and then the water is radiating so then you go from short wve radiation to Long wave radiation which is radiating to the interior so it's over time yeah it's going to release and 9 in of thickness is time with computer analysis and that 9 in is just right for the capacity of the water balancing out how much radiation you're getting in from the Sun and the winter and if it's a masonry wall we'd be 12 in that's what those those are yeah this is the tra wall here and the masonry walls the tra wall parts are deeper because masonry acts different from water water's water's the most efficient actually well if everybody only knew but there's very few of these water walls it store so much more heat so do you have thermal mass and also the effect of the Sun and insul and superinsulation and super insulation from the straw bals and then these are all straw bals you see on so the Bales go from here all the way around but for p we want Mass on the inside and insulation on the outside it's the opposite of the standard construction because you want to hold the Heat and the cools so 6 in of water tank 12 in of trol or stuck on the Bales for holding heat there so we got distributed Mass on the balls Water Mass and masonry mass and the masonry mass of the shearwell here which is the earthquake resistant interior all these Bales went in in a weekend why so fast it's well they're big and everybody gets excited and you can't stop them yeah we built a little cottage right away to be able to move back here as soon as we could with telephone poles wow and a straw Bell even in the ceiling and the only truth window in the office is right there opening so that we could check the moisture check the moisture of the Bales cuz the Bales get too too moist they start rotten out so being dry is real important and keep it right that's why the overhangs besides the Sun overhang thing it's also the brain but you also o don't want to seal the wall and that was the early all the billion officials wanted to put a vapor barrier on the outside well then the wall can't breathe and it rots out too so you got a breathing wall Vapor Barrier can work its way out I the water vapor and so forth here's the sergeant Cyprus all that wood is thing sticking out there yeah and the cabinets are all older that was firewood well that's yeah yeah that looks so well see perfect it just Cooks the outside I mean it crisps the edges but the wood is great and it's kind of kind of half kill dry already so all this furniture came from burnt wood yeah all the wood in here oh this is an antique antique space this is the classic library before Google so you got SC oh wow yeah obsolete we what's up there what's above us oh okay so thermomass economically was the weak link and so we thought we experiment a little bit the Germans make this thing called microl which is a little bottles of paraffin at a nanotechnology scale you can't see them they're so small and we cast them in these tiles they're six times as effective as a brick and then we put those in this dishes so the sun and the winter time is hitting them and they're supposed to radi to the interior so it was an attempt to try to get better thermal mass and U did it work well not as much as we hoped because there's too many windows in here okay we we we loved windows and Views outside there's a door so we this this room was sort of more to hold the photo Vol take panels we have up there than you have a book called pral architecture yeah what's that the best example I took different societies these are classic societies the way they think of space Here's the Japanese meditation Gardens it's layered indirect blah blah blah the French or the thing with the axial things Islamic with the separation of exterior space and interior space IND but if you look this African thing this is a yeah is a fractal because it's it's Corral based on cattle any anyway all so there a lot of stuff in here so you're kind of hoping for more of a revolution in how we see space in architecture not just using materials Like Straw Bale but you think there could be a big change in even how we shape our homes yeah it's going to take all that this is the dogs dog dog's domain and that's our so it has the uh straw bals on that side there has a water tanks oh we should show them how this works here yeah get right here oh okay all right so we got this just standard roof if you get a really cold day in the light spring this thing opens up and it's automatic it has a Freon tube and another one and so in the morning it's like that and then the Sun hits the other tube you see the bolts to and boils the material to that one and it opens and at night goes the opposite it closes yeah we have the same water wall kind of that's water that's the water so there and there's no way of getting in there I mean if you needed to no it's just if it leaks then you'd have to fix it but it hasn't it hasn't leaked we've been doing these for 20 years for ourselves and for clients never a leak sometimes they're made with the top openable and you can get to it but if you just leave a little Gap so that the water can expand when it warms there's no air in the water there's no Oxygen so it doesn't rust okay so basically that water is heating up and then radiating the heat during the night yeah and the water can hold more heat than air yeah twice that twice that of twice out of air this was an attempt to create a loadbearing straw Bell wall this wall is essentially load bearing and it's like a shell it's a curved surface and that gives you much more structure really so it's better like a shell yeah yeah that's much better than the flat wall there's no structure in that other than the Bales so this is chop and it's a mess like chops are [Music] okay so all this wood here is is all the mill wood but this was a wood that was too rough for the house it's kind of a scrap from the lumbering operation after we've done the house this is leftover so okay this was the last building yeah I've drunk a lot of instant espresso over 50 years we've been doing this stuff you get a lot of coffee bottles yeah so you you lay the Bales and then you put this on the outside and this on the inside and you take a a needle is Medieval look things here SC and take a wire through and tie them real tight so a sandwich bail sandwich and then just stule that stule becomes a shell so it almost makes a block well but it's warped surface that's the key is warping the surface to not have and then then the the conservative strob people say oh yeah but it's going to settle differentially so what you know that end settles 10 in more down than this end can anybody tell once it's done except me no most people are very conservative they want the bail straight and smooth but we just like to see the Bales wheel around if you notice no exposed wood on the outside now all that colored metal that's off our all house that burnt yeah this is all this is we had so much of this metal because the other house was three stories and it was made of metal it was a metal house no it was post and beam house but it was covered with metal because we knew about the fire problem but metal is better than wood but not not as good as straw Bell with with straw Bell get a 2hour fire rating so what do you expect if a fire happened what would happen here here you do you expect the fire to oh it's going to be a fire you know that California by that nature Burns off every 40 50 years and we're kind of getting set up for the next cycle here and what of course we have to do is what the the indigenous people did all over the country for the examp control burn every soft and do a light control burn but we're not into that because we're scared of fire for example that that bush behind you there the CIS see us dying they have a certain lifespan and then they die and they're replaced by oak trees that's coming up under it that's just the natural process and then those things are sitting there like a torch you know they dry it out and getting ready to one more year on that and we're going to cut it every year we do a ton of dead stuff and get it out of here because otherwise the fire becomes catastrophic like the last one the California what they call it forestry people claimed that this was the heat release right here was equivalent of two Hiroshima bombs an hour so those fires are really intense and it's a natural part of the process if if you don't let it burn regularly you hold it back hold it back till all the stuff builds up then it really goes it's really catastrophic so Char that's from fire the hotter Parts die the other stuff's growing back around it now so Oaks are very resilient oh yeah so here's the date of all this stuff so here's the child Farm formed and the guy planted all these trees planted these redwoods this one died just last year and then the fire comes in you get this this thing oh scarring maybe from the yeah that's what I think and then right after the fire we had a really wet period so you see the Rings are going D it's really light then the fire comes in then you look at it get some very thick ones cuz so here's the guy that started all this stuff and he did all the ponds he did all the stone work and you see when we when we came first came here all this was the Rocks were here and the ponds were here but there was no water it's an old Trout Farm that we brought back to life except we've converted it instead of trout to end dangerous species maybe we'll run into some red-legged frogs they like to hang out in the we during the day at night they'll be all over the place oh really well I don't see any here this was all bare around the edge and so we brought all this vegetation out of the creeks and stuff and established this it's kind of a natural swimming pool I guess you could call it they're not cooperating the day not there's a turtle but that's Southwest Pond Turtle which is another endangered species here Water Management Forest management fire management ah you got it yeah you been dealing with with a lot of things that are becoming more and more prean and important and the nice thing is it pays us because we get the wood and we get to chase red legged frogs bu frogs

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 103,309

Keywords: wildfire restoration, homestead restoration, regenerative agriculture, ken haggard, organic architecture, water-solar wall, passive solar, earthship, trombe wall, water wall, straw bale house, san luis obispo, fire resistive strawbale, strawbale walls, california wildfires, polly cooper, san luis sustainability group, green architecture, permaculture, pa pattern language, kenneth haggard, passive solar building, fractal architecture, fractal home, improved earthship

Id: oOWpG2S7fxA

Length: 22min 27sec (1347 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 22 2023