The Heralds' Earthship Adventure
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Living the Sustainable Life
We've built our dream home, an Earthship using plans bought from architect Michael Reynolds, on the edge of a gorgeous Rocky Mountain canyon. Our sustainable home is off-grid, heated by the sun in winter and cooled by natural convection and sheltering from the sun in summer. Our electricity comes from the sun via solar panels and an inverter. We do have modern conveniences such as computers, high speed internet, and a dishwasher. We even have a flush toilet in addition to a composting toilet so this is not roughing it at all. Our experiences with solar electricity were featured on Colorado Matters - to find it put 8-13-07 Off-the-Grid with Solar in the search box.
Passive cooling. The sun shades keep the sun from penetrating into the house now that it is moving lower in the sky. In the winter it will keep the earthship toasty but now, in August, with outside temps of 90 degrees we can do without the heat. The shades hang on cuphooks and will be taken down as soon as it starts getting chilly.
Sun shades and zuchinni.
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~~~~Here is our front yard looking towards the house. You can barely see part of the house through the trees on the canyon rim. ~~From the far side of the canyon.
Floors are acid stained concrete. Like most of the house, we did it ourselves.
Many of the interior walls are made from cans or bottles set in a concrete or papercrete matrix.
Earthship Links Our house was part of the cover story in the May 2007 Beacon. It looks like the story disappeared when the June issue came out so I scanned it in. You can see it here. The article does have one glaring error, though. where it says "the home's internal temperature ranges from 58 in the winter to 78 in the summer" those are really the lows and highs. Our former conventional house used to drop down to 55 at night because that is where we set the thermostat. This house occassionally drops down to 58 in pre-dawn winter mornings at 7000 ft. altitude. As soon as the sun rises so does the temperature. I usually have to open the skylight and windows by 9am to keep it from getting too hot on those sunny winter days. So the article makes it sound chilly in here in the winter but it is exactly the opposite. Friends in town have been running their furnaces for a month now while we have only had one evening in the last month when we lit up the wood burning stove. In the last month it has usually been right around 70 degrees in the house when we retire for the night around 10pm. Earthship Biotecture - this is our architect and the inventor of Earthships High Noon Solar - this is our favorite supplier for solar and sustainable living stuff. Living Earth Construction - this is the guy who pounded our tires and helped us build our dream. Life on the Edge - Our life in the earthship blog |
Rural living does have its drawbacks. Here is a letter I now send off with anything like rebates or catalog orders that state P.O. Box addresses are not accepted. You may be able to tell I'm a little bit ticked off by this discrimination against rural residents.
send email to me at: dherald at mac dot com
