Earthships: cheap sustainable housing

What is an Earthship? It's a 100% sustainable house that is inexpensive to build and completely self sustainable, which makes it awesome to live in! When people hear about sustainable, off-the-grid living, they usually think of primitive structures detached from the comforts of the 21st century. And rightfully so, as most sustainable solutions proposed until now have fit that description. Earthships, however, offer all of the comforts of a 21st Century home and more. Here are some picture examples...

But what about Water, Power and Heating/Cooling?

Granted it looks great, but if these houses live off the grid, then where do they get their energy, water, not to mention heating in winter, cooling in summer and sewage. Well to start, the majority of an Earthship's power comes in via Solar Panels installed all around the roof along with Wind-Turbines around the property.

What about water and sewage? Water is collected through a Rain Harvesting system, where the entire roof of the Earthship funnels rain water to a cistern, which then pumps it to sinks and showers when required. That used ‘grey water’ is then pumped into the greenhouse to water the plants. After being cleaned by the plants, the water is pumped up into the bathrooms for use in the toilets. After being flushed, the now ‘black water’ is pumped to the exterior garden to give nutrients to non-edible plants.

As for heating and cooling, these buildings do a proper job of temperature stabilization between the Summer and Winter months involving clever uses of Thermal mass, insulation and ventilation. Even in freezing cold or blistering hot climates, Earthships constantly hover around 70° Fahrenheight (22° Celsius).

This phenomenon results from the solar heat being absorbed and stored by ‘thermal mass’ or tires filled with dirt, which make up the structure of the Earthship. The thermal mass acts as a heat sink, releasing or absorbing heat it when the interior cools and heats up. The thermal mass gathers its energy from the large, southward facing greenhouse windows that allow the sun to heat up the thermal mass throughout the daytime.

Ventilation can be set up for each room to bring air in low and out high as per natural convection without fans. In extremely hot situations, the in coming air can be taken through tubes in the ground before entering the home. This cools the air from the mass of the earth before it enters the living space.

What's more is with the Greenhouse windows and self-controlled temperatures within the Earthship, many Earthship dwellers have outfitted fully functional greenhouses within their homes to grow crops for them year-round. Some have even added fish ponds and chicken coops for constant source of proteins.

 

Great, but how costly is it to build?

Considering that most of the building materials are made up from local (indigenous) materials, occurring 'naturally' in the local area and recycled materials, earthships are exorbitantly cheaper than conventional houses. The most basic Earthships cost as little as $7000 (The Simple Survival model) with the most glamorous models costing $70,000 and up, depending on how flashy you want to be with your decorating.

How are they built?

To start, a hole is dug into the ground to fit the earthship, followed by the foundation wall built up and around it with used tires, each packed full with 2-3 wheelbarrows of dirt. The dirt-filled tires are the key element in giving an earthship it's foundation and structure, along with it's thermal mass, this type of structure is also incredibly resilient to natural disasters compared to conventional houses.
 

As soon as the foundation walls are built the surrounding walls and roof and built up with with a mix of conventional, local and recycled building materials. Many previous designs have used decorative ways of building the surrounding walls from a creative mix of concrete with recycled bottles and cans to modern, conventional woodwork.

Given the nature of the materials used to build these structures, it also contributes to the making of these structures relatively easy to build, even by those who have no building experience whatsoever. The simplicity of the structure allows anybody to master the skills and techniques to build earthships in a matter of hours, not years. These skills must be basic enough that specific talent is not required to learn them, nor does the building process need to involve use of high-tech tools or machines that are  incredibly-limited outside professional construction.

A recent example involves a married couple in their forties whom shared their story at an Earthship conference in Toronto about how they built a 3-story Earthship by themselves in 3 months. They had never built anything before in their lives and were able to build an Earthship with only the printed plans. They did not hire any help, nor did they use expensive equipment to make the job easier. 

 Some other bonuses is with some building materials, tires for instance, some tire dump places would actually pay you for taking some tires off their hands. Living in earthships can provide you with special tax incentives and should you build one and decide to move, you can get higher resale values from selling your Earthship.

Here's an old 27 minute video on building Earthships.

 

Why Earthships?

In summary, Earthships can dramatically change the way we live and interact with the planet in many beneficial ways: between recycling and reducing waste to reducing our carbon footprint and at the same time, giving us the luxury of supporting our own living without the need for the 9am to 5pm daily grind, giving us more free-time to do more of the things we love in life and therefore making us all better people!

Thanks for reading, if you want more information on Earthships, you can view the Earthship Website here and see if there's a Earthship group near you!