Hello, resilient friends, I would like to introduce the earthship home and what you could learn from it for your situation and place. Runaway climate change is here and worsening by the day. The most resilient homes for such a world are the various types of underground homes, full and partial. A fortunate few will be able to build such homes, but most folks could not. But there is much they could do to make their present homes more resilient. Have a look at the earthship home - a hybrid underground design.

The Earthship Difference
How resilient are earthship homes? How different do they perform in harsh climates? This is a clip (7:52 mins) about an earthship in Alberta and how easily it rolls through winter.
https://youtu.be/EAvY5JeMz9w

The Earthship Concept
What are the features of the earthship design?

Here's a 2007 summary of the earthship design concept:
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/21755230/

Earthship founder Mike Reynolds began developing his unique architecture style in the same area of New Mexico, during the "back to the land" movement of the 1960s and 1970s. He built the first actual "earthship" in 1988 in Taos, N.M. There are now about 3,000 earthships worldwide, some 500 of which have been built by Reynolds' company Earthship Biotecture.

The walls of an earthship are made of used tires stuffed with dirt and stacked in a U-shaped pattern. Sunlight warms the house during the day, and the dirt-packed tires hold onto that heat and release it slowly throughout the night.
Rainwater is collected from the roof and recycled through sinks, toilets and planters in a four-step process that uses all sewage. Solar panels and/or wind turbines provide electricity, allowing some owners to be off-the-grid.

"The basic idea of the earthship is that it reaches out with its arms and gathers everything it needs from its local surroundings," said Mischa Hewitt, project manager of Low Carbon Network and author of a recent book on earthships.

Hewitt and his colleagues have just completed Earthship Brighton, the first of its kind in England. The group chose the Reynolds' design over other sustainable architectures because they wanted a "pioneering, high-profile project" that demonstrates how the sun can keep a home warm even in cloudy England.

"Consciousness is the first step," Hewitt said. But he admitted earthships aren't the one-size-fits-all solution.
"The earthship is a fantastic model, but it isn't directly applicable to high-density living environments," Hewitt told LiveScience.
The challenge now, he said, is to find ways that city-dwellers can build and retrofit their houses to lower their carbon footprint.

* At the essay bottom is a technical report on the benefits of using recycled tires as building material.

Here is the floor plan for our earthship. We hope to buy a rural property next year and help build one for our children. Our engineer will finalize the design once we select a property and he could take the terrain into consideration. I added some notes to point out certain items. (Sadly, it's at the max size allowable.)

I'd like to highlight how the Resilience Group has already helped this project along. In an earlier discussion of underground greenhouse designs and passive solar principles, WoodsDweller had pointed out the massive increases in wind strength to come from climate change storms.
http://caucus99percent.com/content/personal-climate-resilience-undergrou...
That got my attention and I wondered about how to protect the big south-facing glass from storms, the way that folks in hurricane country do. During this past week, Martha posted a video clip of how folks in Spain had converted an old barn into an earthship-type home. It is an amazing story:
http://caucus99percent.com/content/resilience-rethinking-how-where-we-live
The clip shows how they used the sliding barn doors to protect the south-facing glass! So now we know how to protect the big glass in passive solar designs.
Then, earlier this morning, Martha suggested she could come out and help us on our earthship build. She's got a decade of carpentry experience and all sorts of skills. She is so welcome!
This is just a small example of the synergies we could develop here in the Resilience Group in our discussions.

How Ellen Craig Built Her Earthship
Can us regular folk build our own earthships? We sure can. You could have one built, just as you would any other house. We don't have that kind of money. We paid CAD6,000 for the building plans. Them we will pay another $6k for our engineer's consulting services during the build. He'll visit during the key phases of the build and be available for help as we go. The build itself will be done with as much volunteer help as possible and using professional assistance for those things we can't do, such as the initial earth-moving. We want the Mighty Machines! :=) Here's an example of how things can go on such a build.

This is the story of Ellen Craig, a Colorado teacher, who built her own earthship in 2005 on a 35-acre plot on difficult terrain.
http://www.motherearthnews.com/green-homes/building-an-earthship-zmaz05z...
Click on the print icon and read it as one page.
[BTW, Mother Earth sells its entire back catalogue of 46 years for around $30. We're long-time subscribers and bought it some years ago. It's a treasure chest for folks wanting to learn more about self-sufficiency, skills-building, and resilience.]

It's a beauty, eh! Here are some extracts from her story.

Building An Earthship Home
I purchased 35 acres in the mountains, selecting the site for its southern exposure, remoteness, spectacular view and large, interesting-looking boulders. Several of those factors ultimately made construction more difficult than I had planned, particularly the steep slope of the site! I purchased Earthship plans and put my existing house on the market. To my surprise, and somewhat to my dismay, it sold in three days, and I had six weeks to move. I quickly made plans to erect a fence for my dogs on the new property, and a friend was generous enough to lend me a pop-up camper, but life was still a bit rugged. I had no electricity and hauled all my water by hand

Most of the heavy work on the house was completed within the next 16 months. Fortunately, I was able to take advantage of the warm summer weather for construction because that’s when I had time off from my job teaching high school physics, math and electronics.

I worked on my house made of tires every step of the way, but decided early on to hire out some of the work to professionals, including excavating the site, building the roof and applying the exterior stucco. I also hired a crew of former students to help build the tire walls. I’ve done as much of the rest of the work as possible, including building the house’s interior walls, and designing and installing the electrical system.

That first summer, I supervised the work as the site was leveled, and then the students and I began building the walls. Tire walls are best built by putting the larger tires at the bottom and decreasing the tire size as the walls get taller. I spent several days at the dump with a rented truck picking through heaps of wet, dirty and heavy tires, looking for the correct sizes.

The next step was to fill the tires with dirt: It took a crew of five about eight weeks to pack and level the tires for the first 1,100 square feet of the dwelling. I purchased a construction-grade transit to accurately measure the angles of the walls, and as a result, the completed walls vary no more than a quarter inch over a 100-foot span. The carpenters who built my roof were impressed. According to them, “stick frame” walls built by professionals are frequently much less flat.

With the roof completed, the garage doors in place and a temporary door on the side where there would eventually be more house, I moved inside. For the next 10 months, I lived without running water or electricity. The “kitchen” was a piece of plywood on two sawhorses with a 2-gallon water dispenser at one end and a two-burner Coleman stove at the other. I loved the dirt floor (no cleaning!) and the portable toilet (someone from the construction crew cleaned it and brought toilet paper)

Inside the Earthship
The Earthship house is now 3,000 square feet, including a 720-square-foot garage. The rooms are huge: A living room, dining room and kitchen are combined as one large room; the other rooms include a bedroom, bathroom, control room (with batteries, water storage, etc.) and utility room. The house was designed so that it could easily be modified to include two more bedrooms and a bathroom

During the excavation of the site, we came upon some large boulders that weren’t going anywhere without heavy explosives. Fortunately, they were along the north side of the house where they could separate the kitchen and the living room. I opted to leave them, doing away with the wall that had been planned there, and instead installed a post and beam for structural support. Now, I’m quite glad we left the boulders intact. Everyone who visits admires them, and my cat loves them, too!

About a year and a half into the project, I finished the bathroom: a lovely, free-form curved wall built out of concrete and aluminum cans, in standard Earthship fashion. The shower and floor were tiled, the toilet and sink installed, so — at last — I had indoor plumbing. My first indoor shower was quite different from the outdoor showers I had been taking. There was no more view of the mountains, but it was breeze-free, with unlimited hot water, thanks to my on-demand water heater: a wonderful energy-efficient appliance that I would recommend to anyone.

The electrical system was my next major project. I had always wanted solar electricity, and I planned to hook up to the rural electric company as a backup. But because I had chosen such a remote location, it was cheaper to go completely off the grid than to bring in power lines.

I designed my own solar setup using ideas in the Solar Living Sourcebook I ordered from Real Goods and some help from their support staff. The water-pumping system is composed of two panels connected to a direct-current (DC) pump with no batteries, which means the pump only works in sunny weather. To compensate, I installed a 600-gallon cistern to store water. When the water level starts to get low, a float switch automatically activates the well pump.

The electrical system consists of a dozen 75-watt solar panels, a Trace inverter, an Ananda APT Powercenter to monitor everything and 20 golf cart batteries. I followed the simple directions supplied by Real Goods and installed everything myself. I also bought a very efficient SunFrost refrigerator and a small freezer. All this cost less than having the power company run lines to my house. Since then, my solar system has operated for eight years at no additional cost. I think it was quite a deal.

With the solar power supply in place, it was time to wire the house for electricity. I bought a book called Wiring Simplified by H.P. Richter, drew my own plans and started stringing wire. Much to my delight, I passed both the electrical rough-in inspection and the final inspection on the first try. Not long after that, I got a certificate of occupancy and breathed a sigh of relief, knowing I had cleared the last legal hurdle.

How'z that for resilience, eh? :=) A low bow before Ellen Craig.

Well, I better stop here for now :=) I welcome your thoughts, ideas, questions, dreams, and comments.
Peace be with us, if we take risks to learn new concepts and techniques,
gerrit

* http://www.calrecycle.ca.gov/Publications/Documents/GreenBuilding%5C4330...
Designing Building Products Made With Recycled Tires June 2004