While I obviously enjoy reading and writing fiction, an earthship isn’t something you’re going to see on the SciFi channel. It’s something that you can see today, right here on good old planet Earth.
So what is an earthship, anyway? In brief, it’s a self-sustaining – in terms of water and power – structure that is also very environmentally friendly. On top of that, depending on how you build it, it can be significantly less expensive than a conventional home.
The brainchild of Michael Reynolds, the earthship concept essentially takes materials that are currently looked up on as wasted products – used car tires, glass bottles, and aluminum cans – and uses them as the foundation for a structure that is incredibly sturdy, stays cool in the summer and warm in the winter, can supply its inhabitants with water through rain catchment, electricity through solar power, and even provides an indoor greenhouse to freshen your air and even give you some extra food.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDRstVYF7wA
I don’t know about you, but I really hate paying increasingly outrageous electric rates. Water is not only becoming more expensive, but it’s a precious commodity to begin with – and much of the water we use is simply flushed down the toilet, creating an enormous burden on the sewer systems (which means more money spent to maintain and upgrade them).
But with an earthship, all that goes away.
- Three foot thick walls – tires filled with packed earth – help maintain a pleastant temperature year-round, even in very cold or very hot climates. So out goes the air conditioner and the heat pump (you’ll still likely be required to have a backup heat source – how about an adobe fireplace?).
- Since you just got rid of the biggest users of electricity in your home, you can get by with a much more manageable solar power system. You have to be reasonable in your electric budget, but wouldn’t it be worth changing your lifestyle slightly to thumb your nose at those heinous electric and gas bills?
- You can use rainwater caught by your roof and drained into large cisterns for your potable water. Poof! There’s no more need to pay for water or those expensive hookup and footer fees.
- Waste water from your sinks and shower (or bathtub) can be used to water indoor and outdoor “gray water” planters. So in addition to recycling a precious resource into food or attractive plants, you also just eliminated most of your need for a sewer connection or septic tank.
- As for the toilet, my personal leaning there is to just get a composting toilet and ditch entirely the use of water to flush away the poo. I mean, really: we use drinking water to flush away our bodily wastes. How dumb is that? But even if you don’t like that idea and want a conventional flush-away system, you’ll only be flushing toilet water and not all the other reusable water.
The earthship also doesn’t require you to be a supergenius with building materials. It’s made out of pretty basic stuff: tiers, dirt, wood, glass, aluminum cans, concrete, and stucco (plus the plumbing, fixtures, etc.). The biggest ingredient you’ll need is labor: you’ve got to pound a lot of dirt into every tire that goes into the walls, and depending on the size of your earthship, there will likely be anywhere from 500 to 700 tires. That’s a LOT of tires, yes, but if you can hire a dozen folks for a couple weeks or so, you can probably get it done (hey, offer a free barbecue every weekend to the local high school football team until the tires are done!).
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TbxhpG-Y4Q&feature=related
And you can build an earthship anywhere you can get the basic ingredients together. There are variations in the design based on the climate, but it can be built anywhere in the world. When I retire, we plan to move somewhere in the southwest and start building one of these puppies!
If you’re interested in finding out more, there’s a PDF overview, plus a few of the many sites that have more info:
- AIDG Blog
- Our Earthship
- Energize Clinton County
- Kirst’s Earthship Adventures
- Oscar and Lisa’s Earthship Build
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#1 by Rogier Noort on February 6th, 2009 - 7:33 am
Hihi.., my comment was to short. So I’ll refrase it slightly. Here it goes:
Why wait?
Well, that was it really.
Cheers, and thanks for the pingback.
#2 by Michael R. Hicks on February 6th, 2009 - 3:08 pm
Hi, Rogier! I would build an earthship today, but I’m tied to our current house for several years yet. We’ve been looking (not too seriously yet) for land in the southwestern U.S., but haven’t found anything quite yet.
#3 by Holly Jahangiri on February 6th, 2009 - 7:49 pm
Sounds good, Michael! I was always intrigued by the underground dome houses, and yurts. Do you have to be a vegetarian in order to make use of a composting toilet? I should think so… maybe not, but if not, it could be kind of nasty.
#4 by Michael R. Hicks on February 6th, 2009 - 8:08 pm
Holly, no, you don’t have to have any special diet or anything to use a composting toilet – everything breaks down naturally! You don’t put the resulting compost on food plants, of course, but you can use it on flower beds and that sort of thing (and it’s just like “regular” compost).