Open Source Ecology

William Cleaver will be joining us at Factor e Farm on May 1 for a Dedicated Project Visit. He’s coming from across the big pond – from the United Kingdom – and we are planning for a 3 month stay.

William is not a novice to creative dexterity – he’s involved in repair and demolition of industrial chimney stacks and natural draught cooling towers – at heights. See for yourself:

He has experience with various tools, welding brickwork, ropework, woodwork, and general shop.  He’s traveled the world, studied Romance languages, taught English in Chile, and is certified to teach high ropes courses. He is now showing great interest in the deeper message of post-scarcity, resilient community creation.

We discussed the following tentative plan, with both of us working in the shop and as needed:

May – Work on finishing or building Sawmill/LifeTrac II/MicroTrac II/ anciliary implements for construction – all in preparation for building.

June – begin building autonomous, zero energy housing with solar space. Experiment with CEB floors, CEB masonry stove and chimney, stabilized bricks, stabilized reject lime bricks, stabilized brick walkway and driveway, stabilized retaining walls, and others. We plan on winter food garden and sprouting in the solar space. If progress on the steam engine goes well, we’ll aim to install combined heat and power on the masonry stove.

July – continue building until comfortable accommodations for the winter are ready for several people.

We’re looking at building zero energy homes that look tentatively like this:

(Credits: Aigars Bruvelis in Blender)

Here is a CEB floor example from Abe at Vela Creations:

See more of his photos here.

Other than this, William is learning Kdenlive on Linux for movie editing, as well as and QCad for CAD work. These are staple tools now at Factor e Farm. William will begin preparing some of the technical drawings for the sawmill, so we can collaborate on making that happen over distance until his arrival.

We do want to consider bringing in additional help from the CEB general contractor, Floyd (see last blog post). We will consider hosting a CEB workshop if progress is good. If the CEB fabrication is going well – there could be resources generated to really get things moving forward, and continue to build more structures. I think now is the beginning of really settling into the land – and getting the place to look half-way presentable. We’re open to all kinds of ideas, such as the proposed CEB vault construction and others – but we’d need other people to get involved to push those projects forward. Otherwise, we’re sticking to basics and all types of experiments in the process.

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We’ve got some great news on Inga’s House. We have succeeded in inviting Dipl.-Ing. Dittmar Hecken. He is the hands-on instructor from the Earth Building Course that Inga attended at the University of Kassel, in Germany. University of Kassel is the home of Prof. Dr. Gernot Minke‘s group – world leaders in earth construction theory and practice. You can also see Inga’s interview with Dr. Minke in a previous post. We recommend his seminal book on earth construction, Building with Earth: Design and Technology of a Sustainable Architecture, which came out earlier this year. The Europeans are decades ahead of America in earth construction, it seems.

Dittmar will provide us with the needed expertise to build a structure, out of CEBs – that will look like this structure from Tamera. Dittmar led one of the construction groups on this project, and the structure was designed by Gernot Minke:

This is major news for Factor e Farm. A roof of compressed earth block is a high technical accomplishment. The roof is the most expensive part of a house, so this makes economic sense as well – as our friends from Africa will tell you with respect to Nubian vaults. Plus, earth-sheltered housing like this is king of ecological biotecture, if you ask me. Here we’re combining ancient wisdom of earth building with modern CEB machines – open source, under one roof.

We’ll be offering North America’s first workshop on CEB vault construction – end of September, 2009. We’ll get Inga’s House out of it, and we aim to attain a basic level of mastery on CEB construction technique. The world gets full documentation of the process – including open source machinery – for replicability. Inga and the team are doing their homework. Stay tuned.

No, you don’t have to know that the catenary shape of a vault is actually a hyperbolic cosine function. But I bet there will be a large number of these structures popping up all over the Americas. We need to catch up to the rest of the world on this one.

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To our colonic relief, we added a second composting toilet, a public outhouse with privacy. Now no one needs to wonder who is going to enter the vestibule while performing defecation maneuvers. Albeit temporary, it satisfies our immediate needs. Thanks to Orin for helping construct it!

We also moved the humanure compost to south-west of the hexacubes, across from and downstream of the last stream on the west most side of the property. It’s the blue barrel in the picture below:

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Molly and I built a hand washing station and I put together a shower Factor e Farm. This post is an analysis of the sanitation issues rooted in geography, infrastructure, and human use following Christopher Alexander’s guidelines for design analysis.

All of Factor E Farm’s housing, work, and animal facilities have been constructed in the site’s flood plain among major runoff channels. The building zone was chosen for quick delivery and easy access by car rather than drainage. Development has continued under assumptions that the site is only temporary and that a whole new Solar Village will be built to replace the original site. This assumption depends on the tools and techniques under development.

(more…)

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Well, not really green in winter, but it will soon be.

Today we put straw and earth on top of the CEB workshop addition – for a living roof. Without LifeTrac assist, this would have been an arduous task. With LifeTrac, we were able to do most of the work in about 4 hours today. The roof construction technique is truss-oriented strand board-6 mil poly-6 mil poly-carpet-straw-soil. That’s the industry standard – at Factor e Farm.

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