Re: building blocks

["Sarah Kopp" <kopp@kinneret.co.il>]

-----Original Message-----
From: William McQueen and Colleen Finley <massage@springsips.com>
To: ZEPHREM67@aol.com <ZEPHREM67@aol.com>
Cc: strawbale@crest.org <strawbale@crest.org>
Date: á' èáú úùñ"à 10:03
Subject: Re: building blocks


>Shawn:
>
>we looked at rastra while visiting AZ last summer.....the house was going
to be
>huge...in Desert Highlands in Carefree.....from the write-ups and from a
>distance it looks good..it's a frame-work of recycled soda bottles and
>concrete.....but up close you see that the frame-work has to be filled with
side
>to side AND top to bottom rebar and then filled with concrete.....way too
much
>metal and concrete.....
>
>the only place we might consider using it would be for a foundation
>wall....plaster sticks directly to it....
>
The Rastra I have seen are interlocking building blocks made of recycled
styrofoam (coffee cups etc.) and are structural, not requiring rebar
re-enforcement.  A friend of mine built a house with them and filled the
voids in the blocks with mud instead of concrete, then plastered the outside
with cement and the inside with earth plaster.  The insulation value is
pretty good.  I often wish I had let a contractor build me one of those
instead of trying to build my own sb house! (Still waiting to get in there,
folks.)

Sarah
Tsfat, Israel

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