Super Efficient Off-Grid Earthship Built for Early Retirement Plan

we love being off-grid it's so nice to feel that you're not connected to all that stuff you're not reliant on it if the hydro goes out you're not panicking wondering how you're going to cook supper you know it's just a really nice feeling to feel self-reliant an ER ship will perform as well in Canada as it does anywhere else if it's built properly every time you build it it has to be built for the environment so in New Mexico they build it one way because it's a very dry environment we have to build it differently here but it's evidence we have people come here all the time it says we've been told it won't work and I said well what do you think no they're standing in a go well it works pretty good they came in the wintertime and it's like you say it's -20 outside and it's warm in the house and we have no furnace I mean it works this is the entrance coming into the house there's tires in behind here these are pop can walls and that's part of our closet the bottle walls on here our bedroom is on the other side of that and when you go on the other side the sunlight coming through here in the morning it's just like jewels inertia piz it's built out of tires to start with the back wall and the east and the west walls are all made of tires that's the thermal mass it has glass on an angled at right angles to the winter Sun it produces all its own electricity collects all its own drinking water and takes care of its wastewater supposed to take care of everything in-house not there's a lot of recycled material in here there's a lot of pop cans and bottles for the bottle walls and of course the tires the tires were delivered to the property for free that people wanted to get rid of them so badly they delivered them to us all the tires in the house is 1,200 tires the bathroom is is on the front of the house this is according to Michael Reynolds original plans and he says that you always put the bathroom on the south wall so it's nice and warm the shower is warm in the evening when you take a shower and there all the walls have heated up all day so you have the heat radiating out so you have a warm shower the composting toilet got us out of having to have a septic system this is a non electric so that it doesn't have a heating pad in it doesn't consume any electricity to sink in the shower around the corner the sink was handmade for us the idea is is the the sink is open so you can get a wheelchair right up to the sink and the same thing with the shower is just a level entry so our idea is to try and stay here as long as we can we don't know what it's going to be our lives are going to be like down the road so if it buys us a couple more years and now sits it's worth it there are things you have to get used to you have to adapt your lifestyle to this way of living because you can't the house and your power supply dictates when you can do things like you can't just do wash whenever you feel like it it's you're going to be doing laundry on a sunny day when you have lots of power coming in you know you just it's basically that kind of thing you just you have to be more in tune with I guess what's going on around you this is a planter we've literally grown everything in here there isn't anything that we haven't there's those are sweet potatoes growing in there there's carrots here pineapple over there a couple of banana trees beans everything grows in here in a fraction of the time that it grows outside it's just there's a lot more sunlight there's heat all the way around it it just seems to grow really quick but even it with that you can't grow all your food in the house this will supplement you still need something outside we try to produce as much as we can our own food with a you know large garden and we're growing fruit trees and things and trying to be a self-sustainable that way as we possibly can you know then that's another way of being off the grid if you're not reliant on grocery stores for 100% of your food you know it saves you a lot of money and you know where your food came from we have 17 windows across the front of the house there's actually more windows than what we need for the square footage it's Michael Reynolds said 20 percent of the floor square footage is what you need in glass and we have more than that so kind of we have a bigger furnace than what we need for this square footage the glass needs to be on right angles to the winter Sun so December 21st the the Sun and the glass should be at right angles to each other and what that's going to do is it's going to allow the Sun to come in and penetrate radiant so there's a tremendous amount of energy coming in in the summertime the Sun literally only comes in as far as the planter so it doesn't come back there anymore so the house is nice and cool the bottom windows are straight up and down because we want to be able to open them and we have six on each end that will open to a lot lots of air come into the house so on those really warm days tremendous amount of air comes in and a tremendous amount of air can go out through all the venting that we put in the house I mean the wintertime most times we're sitting probably Celsius around 22 degrees getting a building permit was easy it for us anyway that this county was very open to this type of a building they welcomed it actually and as long as we had an engineer and an architect on board with it they were fine with every part of it we have 600 square feet upstairs and there's 2,400 on the ground floor there's a reason for the size if you think wow I could make a much smaller one but it does need to have a certain amount of size to work properly it needs enough window area to heat this space it'll hold 70 to 72 degrees year-round with no energy and no air conditioning I mean this is so far beyond it's not even measurable they have these lead programs whether they test homes this is so far beyond that I mean they test furnaces and how efficient they are this has no furnace I mean it doesn't fit into any category or is it actually is the best house on the planet all the water in our house is rainwater there's a 2,000 gallon concrete cistern outside and that's for us that's a year's worth of water so all we need is a very small rain once a year and we're good we have three kilowatts of solar we have four batteries I think there's 900 amps it's a it's a tremendous amount of energy for what we need our consumption is so little that even getting a small amount of energy coming in every day fills up the batteries and also dumps to our hot water we are off the grid and in every way there are no lines hooked up to the house at all ah hydro comes from the solar or water comes from the roof of the house we have no septic system which is a huge savings and composting toilet gray water system we have no bills not a No I think it's important for everybody to leave less of a footprint and live as sustainably as possible so it's not necessarily saving the planet because we can't do that on our own but if we can show other people you know if they if they can follow in our footsteps that's a good thing we're looking at something that was more efficient than what we were living in and we're actually looking at retiring and the house that we were living in was going to be nothing but bills we were literally never going to be able to retire so this is our retirement or pension

Channel: Exploring Alternatives

Views: 1,159,758

Keywords: off grid, off the grid, off grid living, off grid house, earthship, documentary, earth ship, earth ship documentary, earth ship house, mike reynolds, wind chasers, exploring alternatives, sustainable living, solar energy, composting toilet, wind power, passive solar, green living, early retirement, earthship tour, recycled tires, garbage warrior, upcycling, reclaimed materials, glass bottle walls, cob house, straw bale house, diy house, earthship canada, earthship winter

Id: oTU2KlwOnQw

Length: 9min 24sec (564 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 02 2016