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A interesting read

If you are a hippie from Taos, New Mexico, you know what an earthship is. It’s an off-grid earth-bermed passive solar home with exterior walls made of old tires packed with dirt.

Although many people assume that the term “earthship” is generic, like “straw-bale home” or “underground house,” it isn’t. It’s a trademark owned by a for-profit company,Earthship Biotecture. The company was founded by a Taos architect named Michael Reynolds, who began developing his earthship construction principles in the 1980s. Over the years, he gradually refined these principles and shared them with the public in several books and articles.

Michael Reynolds is an architect, custom home builder, and real-estate developer. His business activities include new home construction, consulting, the sale of earthship plans, and the promotion of Earthship communities.

Reynolds does not live in an earthship, however. In his book Off the Grid, journalist Nick Rosen describes several encounters with Mike Reynolds. “When I asked to visit him in his own home Mike was surprisingly reluctant,” Rosen wrote. “I found out where the Reynolds house is located and was brought there by a local guide. … And it’s on the grid — all of the grids: power, water, sewage, even cable.”

The defining characteristics of an earthship

According to Reynolds, earthships have the following six characteristics:

• Some of the building materials consist of discarded or recycled items, including old vehicle tires (typically used to build earth-bermed walls). Interior partitions are sometimes made from discarded aluminum beverage cans (used as “bricks”) and mortar.
• The homes are oriented according to passive solar principles (and in some cases use earth tubes as ventilation ducts).
• In most cases, the homes are off-grid, producing their electricity on site with a PV array, a wind turbine, or a gas generator.
• The homes usually include a cistern to store water gathered from the roof.
• The homes treat sewage on site rather than being hooked up to a municipal sewer system.
• The homes include a greenhouse capable of growing food.

Earthships have a strong appeal to a certain category of green builders. The elements that Reynolds emphasizes — the use of discarded materials and dirt to build walls, the focus on passive solar design principles, and the use of renewable energy systems — are aligned with popular ideas about environmental stewardship.

One possible problem with a wider adoption of earthship construction methods: foundation walls made from tires packed with dirt do not meet most building codes.

Comfortable in all climates?

Like Wolfgang Feist, Reynolds suggests that his design and construction principles are universal enough to apply everywhere; in fact, the official Earthship website brags that “earthships maintain comfortable temperatures in any climate.” Yet some of Reynolds’ requirements — including the requirement for a cistern — don’t seem particularly universal.

In New Mexico, where Reynolds’ principles were first developed, water can be scarce; in that climate, a cistern connected to a water filtration system may be useful. In well-watered areas like northern New England, however, where rural homes commonly draw water from surface springs or drilled wells, installing a cistern to gather rainwater from the roof is usually an unnecessary expense.

Setting off a reader’s “exaggeration alert system”

Most intelligent readers have an E.A.S. — that is, an exaggeration alert system (also known as a bullsh*t alarm). Unfortunately, Reynolds’ statements frequently set off my E.A.S.

For example, in a video promoting his earthship designs, Reynolds introduces the topic this way: “Imagine living in a home that costs you nothing to heat or cool. … Imagine no utility bills. … The three-foot thick massive walls and the method of incorporating them into the earth create living spaces with a thermal dynamic that results in a stable room temperature.”

In an article called “Australia falling for Earthship marketers,” journalist Nick Rosen reports that Reynolds told an Australian audience that earthships are “buildings that heat and cool themselves.” He also claimed that “an Earthship home has no utility bills.”

In an article on Earthships published in Makezine, an online magazine, Andrew Terranova reports that “The Earthship team has even designed their own vertical-axis windmill, called the Dynasphere.” Indeed, information on the Dynasphere turbine can be found on the official Earthship website. Since vertical-axis machines are the “insulating paint” of renewable energy equipment, this news is not encouraging. (For a physics-based explanation of why vertical-axis wind turbines underperform their horizontal-axis rivals, see “Thoughts on Vertical-Axis Wind Turbines,” by Robert Preus.)

 The rest here 

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