Energy Matters Forums

[Icarus]

Gordan ,
well I bet your small round adobe building will stand for a 100 yrs , thanx for the link ,I just have to find a supplier here in gosford ,
what I really like to do is build a house into the side of a nth facing hill or mountian like a hobbit , maybe one day .

cheers Dave

[Tracker]

I aligned the house for passive solar,

Don't tell you you made a steerable platform for it too.. HeHeHe

[KarenS]

Here is one of the best "BubbleWrap for Dummies" sites I've seen!

http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/Co ... lewrap.htm

And if you go back to it's homepage,

http://www.builditsolar.com/index.htm

and specially the DIY projects section, there's enough to keep you going for about 50 years!!! Just remember it's a US site, so you need to swap south and north, and remember about their strange electrics, and a few other bits and pieces, but there's an awful lot of useful stuff there, specially for retrofitting your miserable 1960s timber abode which faces the wrong way, and has windows in the wrong walls, and holes everywhere etc etc etc, you know the scene...

[conklinc]

Back in the 80's I used a bobcat to dig out a basement under my existing house . . . used a Bobcat CAREFULLY! Of course the walls were rebar reinforced concrete with a sheet of black plastic up against the dirt before pouring. Once poured, while the concrete wall was still "green" . . . I furred out the wall with 2"x2" timber and filled in the space between the furring strips with cut up corrugated cardboard several layers thick to about 2"/5 cm. Pretty effective and cheap insulation with the corrugation and airspace within the cardboard. Cheap as in free, just a little labor to carefully cut the cardboard to fit between the furring strips, then on went the gypboard. Very warm, snug basement in the winter when the temp was -15 Celsius. I suppose it is technically a fire hazard, but with 1/2 in. gypboard on one side and 9 in. of concrete on the other, what's to burn?