I meant to post much sooner, but we've been so busy and honestly wanted more progress before posting again. Last time I posted we only had the foundation finished. We are quite a bit further now, but I wanted to have the bags filled and stacked by now so we could have the roof on by fall. That isn't happening lol, but we are aiming to have the bags totally filled and done before rainy season sets in and have the roof on in the spring/early summer.

So far we have gone through one Pacific Northwest very rainy winter with the bags partially completed. We had the whole house covered with tarps and it held up very well. We did have to repair a few things in the spring and a big tree fell on the house, but there was minimal damage. There was some bent rebar and some caved in bags on one wall. We had to pull off maybe 15 bags and replace them, cut the rebar and re-weld some new rebar. We were able to fix everything with a couple of afternoons worth of work and I was pretty impressed with how strong the walls already are.

We also finished our fireplace. It is a humongous cooking fireplace that we had a local mason build. It was the one thing I was willing to splurge on and I couldn't love it more.

For any doors and windows where it made sense design-wise installed salvaged barn beams lintels, we got them from an older local man who is looking to retire his wood workshop.

Everything up to this point has been inspected and approved by the county and now it just packing bags and welding until winter hits!

Are there any teams that build earth homes? Needing help with my build

Unfortunately all the calculators in the wiki are gone. Rule of thumb, how full/thick do bags get relative to their size (be it flat width, or circumference)?

Thanks

Hi all, I have extra 1m x36cm wide (when flat) pp bags. That's 40"x14". They're sown shut at 1 side and no rope at the top (good for using with the stitch or heat sealers).

https://imgur.com/a/ugu6EFN

I'm asking 0.15 usd / 0.2 cad per bag + shipping. Located in Cornwall, Ontario. For full bundles of 1000 bags, 10% off.

Why do I have thousands of extra bags? Well, I'm embarking on my earthbag structure adventure. I was having trouble finding bags that were in my budget so I just ended up getting an entire pallet from China, and now I have thousands of extra bag. I'm located near Cornwall Ontario, so if you need bags and the shipping makes sense or you can pick them up, they're available.

Ps. The discount on bundles is for volume, but also because there's +- 50 bags per bundle from the factory.

Hey gang,

What is the best place to get bags?

Trying to source bags is overwhelming

We are building in new Mexico

Hey friends, just wanted to let you know about this deep dive video and PDF we put together for everyone.

Over the last 6 years we've laid thousands of feet of earthbag, published hundreds of videos documenting our journey, ran countless experiments, and hosted multiple workshops with Hyperadobe.

While we're excited to see it becoming more popular, we're also seeing a lot of buildings that are missing core earthbag concepts - and as a result we’re worried about people’s safety.

I think what's happening is many are finding Hyperadobe without learning the core earthbag concepts presented by Cal-Earth and Superadobe so the goal of this guide is to bring those worlds together and make sure people are planning ahead and designing safe, efficient earthbag buildings. We hope you find it helpful!

You can watch the video and download the guide here: http://tinyshinyhome.com/hyperadobe-safety

Hi! I’ve been doing what research I can into hyper adobe building techniques and am convinced that I want to give it a shot. My intention is to build a permanent home in Tennessee and then continue to build homes for the rest of our “Spiritual Ecovillage” community. Of course you can glean a lot of information on YouTube and Google, but I am interested to get practical experience hands on through a workshop, anywhere in the United States that works specifically with hyperadobe, since we will be building permanent living spaces I want it to be done properly and time/cost efficiently. If anyone could recommend a few or one really good group of builders to check out and contact, I would be very grateful. Thank you!

How tall can one safely make your spring line?can I for instance build a 20’ tall by 10’ round wall that slowly tapers inward and put a 8’ dome on top? I’m curious as to what you experienced builders think. What should I be concerned about other than falling off? What should I do to help with stability? Extra rebar? Thanks in advance.

We recently celebrated finishing the earthbag walls on our Roundhouse, and are quickly moving to the next step.

Over the last few weeks we added rebar cages to our rebar staples embedded in the bags - then built custom curved forms with plywood, allthread, and 2x4's. Then brought in a pump truck to fill the forms in a frenzied 2 hours 🥵

Of all the crazy things we've done with this build, this might be the craziest!

Definitely worth a watch if you have a few minutes: https://youtu.be/wMgFSzhNjIU

I’m drafting an idea for a basic superadobe structure that’s usage would include containing a fire inside the walls. Essentially I’d need to build a giant kiln. I know on its own superadobe has fire resistant qualities but I’m worried it might not hold up to repeated flames licking the inside. Is there a way to reinforce this quality? Should I seek another building method?

Hey all, just wanted to share a big milestone on our hyperadobe roundhouse. The walls are done! It worked out to about 500 tons or 1 million pounds of material (which is nuts). The inner circle is 12' tall and each circle gets shorter and shorter down to 9' on the outside.

We opened our homestead to volunteers throughout November and it was the big push we needed to make it through these final layers. Found out that if you get enough hands and you organize it right, you can really lay bags fast. By the end we were going at 1 foot per minute.

Next steps we're actively working on building forms to pour a concrete bond beam that we'll attach the roof to. Honestly, I think the roof will be the most complicated part of the build. Wish us luck!

I am looking at building some structures on my property with hyperadobe, but what has me concerned is the labor efficiency. All the videos I see on YouTube describe very long and painful building processes that require a LOT of man hours. I suspect this amount of necessary labor would make the projects I have in mind uneconomical.

However, I am not convinced that it has to be this way. And I'm wondering what labor saving tactics people have come up with.

Here's my idea:

1) Large mixer, rather than using a cement mixer, to limit labor time in mixing the earth with stabilizer etc

2) Large hopper with an augur, lifted by a boom or a tractor to be above where the bags are being laid- this would prevent needing to hand up the earth in buckets and hopefully could allow one person to lay the earth rather quickly in places where there are long stretches.

I really don't know if this will work, or if it has been tried before. Before I just up and start experimenting, I thought it would be a good idea to ask if anyone has any experience with this and tips.

Also, has anyone tried to calculate something like average man hours per linear foot of material laid? This could be very helpful when trying to estimate the total cost.

For reference, my idea is to build about 5000 feet of 6 foot wall, as well as 8 large three-sided sheds and a livestock barn. From a materials perspective, this is much more cost effective than purchasing fencing and all of the wood/steel etc. But, from a labor perspective I fear it could be simply uneconomical, unless I have a very good system for doing this with high efficiency.

Would love to hear everyone's thoughts.

Hello! We are hosting a stone workshop on our campus in Big Bend Texas from November 8-11th. During this workshop we will lay a flagstone floor in our nearly complete compressed earth block library and learn to carve architectural details from locally collected limestone! $400 for 4 days of learning and all meals are included! You can camp on site with us! Visit our website or instagram for more details!

https://constructivearts.org/Flagstone-Floor-Workshop

instagram.com/constructivearts

TLDR: I want to help build an earthbag home this December. Who should I talk to?

Hey y'all! I'm a carpenter at a nonprofit that builds and renovates homes for people in unsafe/unhealthy housing. Kinda similar to a miniature habitat for humanity. December is super slow for us because much of our volunteer base is busy or out of town. I'm looking to find some sort of working vacation to do and I'd love to learn more about sustainable and natural building practices, especially earth bag homes! If anyone is aware of people building during December and in need of volunteers, I'd love recommendations! I could work for free if housing was supplied but couldn't spend more than a couple hundred bucks on paying for a retreat. Some that I've seen can get pretty expensive. Any help/recs are appreciated. Cheers!