Strawbale Archive for March 2002

Andreas, your plan sounds ambitious and wonderful.
Good Luck and (btw) we love Tucson.
Mike




Mike, I personally think this is a fantastic way to build. Congratulations,
I'd love to see some pics of your house.

I'm seriously leaning that way since the house I designed is a two story
with a small footprint (34' x 34' exterior, 30' x 30' -or in bale speak: 9
bales by 9 bales- interior space with 2' 3 string bales laid flat) with all
the obvious cost benefits.

Also, in order to reduce costs, the second floor walls (north and south)
will start at 5 or 6 feet height and gradually go up to 11-12' at the top of
the gable roof (i.e cathedral ceiling upstairs). The roof slope with face
true south where it will host an expanding array of solar panels and passive
solar water heaters that will provide hot water and radiant floor heat
(during the "brutal" 33°F Tucson winters).

The roof trusses will be a 'supertruss' where it will allow for the
catherdral ceiling [McDonald book, page 92 -I think-). Since a loadbearing
structure is out of the question, I slowly, and very elementally I might
admit, started devising the same concept as that explained below in
excellent detail that would create a galvanized cage.

If anybody is interested in my design (my 2 cents worth of designing
ability), I'll add that the roof will overhang to a 10' wraparound (N, S, E)
porch that will act as  living/storage area/earth plaster protector. Also,
the south side will be passive solar with a big rock 2 way
fireplace/wall/heat mass capacitor structure that will emit the stored
thermal energy to the whole downstairs living area.

Downstairs, by the way, will be one big room minus a bathroom and a pantry.
The stairs will be on the west side as a big spiral rock staircase that will
connect the downstairs to the upstairs and will have the shape of a castle
structure (cool for the kids). The reason I'm not using a wraparound porch
on the west side, is that the house will be backed up to the hill we own and
is pretty safe from horizontal rains and most importantly (In Arizona) the
summer western sun that cooks the walls of a house like a magnifying glass
on an unsuspecting ant.

Also, on the east side there will be an upstairs patio running the whole
length (~30') for some casual viewing of the majestic views the Tortolita
mountains offer. The Elevation of our land is 3500' with an average of 6.4
sun hours/day. That's 640wh for each 100W panel per day when using a 1 or 2
axis tracker, approx. 30% less with stationary position at 32 degrees
elevation (for AZ). I have plans for running off-grid (Solar/Wind power
@48Volts DC + a big array of Deep Cycle batteries (Costco only $60 each) for
about 2,000 Ah of energy, along with a small generator (5KW) for emergency
backup power and battery conditioning (never let your batteries dicharge
deeply before recharging - a 10% cycle is recommended for maximum battery
life)

Also, the nice metal roof will graciously be used for water harvesting, grey
and black water plumming for watering, Radiantec floor heating.

The exterior plaster will be earth -the beautiful dark red earth that we
have in the property- fortified with asphalt emulsion and the interior
probably the same with lime added.
Initially, when we first bought the land (18 acres that includes a wash with
beautiful thick sand, gentle and steep slopes) and saw how much beautiful
rock there is, the cheapest way to go would be to buid a rock house with
very thick exterior walls for thermal mass capability, but I've been a
memeber of this list for over 2 years and I love SB too much not to use it.
I gotta have insulation for the summers and passive solar orientation and
design for the sunny winters.

Anyway, sorry for wasting your bandwidth, I just had to share my dream with
this wonderful mailing list (God, we're SO much better than the Pepsi
Vending Machine mailing list)

Andreas in soon to be scorching Tucson AZ






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