I often peruse cheap land... I have a bad habit of drooling over the plots of land and what I could do with them. Someday I'll be able to save up enough money to get the hell out of dodge, but until then I'll look at property like this and dream about Earthships and atmospheric water collection.

What is an Earthship, you ask? It's that thing the kooky wonderful people in the New Mexico dessert build:


They are beautiful and functional. They use the elements in which they are placed and can make even the most inhospitable place feel like home. The are self-heating and self-cooling food producing machines. Living, breathing spaces that you live in tandem with. The greenhouse at the front can be as large or as small as you need for you and your loved ones, we would need a pretty massive one, but I also plan to do aquaponics in shipping containers outside.

An Earthship is, in essence, creating your own biome.

The basic premise is this:

They can be as complicated or as simple as you would like and there are many designs to get ideas from. (some are even free)

How do you build one?

Most of the are built with rammed tires for their thermal mass/berm foundation:

The ones I really like are built with earthbags (mainly because I'm lazy by nature lol):

(This is a video of a "normal" house built with earthbags but you can build Earthships with them as well)

I have a soft spot in my heart for counties that don't have super strict building codes and have super cheap prices so southern Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas are usually in my searches... sure its hot but the house I build will be mostly underground so who cares lol. Most counties don't allow the building of alternative houses, mostly because they don't know how to classify them (bureaucracy in all its glory lol).

When it comes to passive water collection I tend to look towards the north western states due to humidity and rain collection, but finding counties with lax building codes there is difficult. The demand for land up there is pretty high as well so finding land for 5-10k USD is hard as well (not impossible, but you certainly don't get as much bang for you buck up there). I also loose a lot of passive solar heating.

It's all a game of give and take, no area will ever be perfect, but the wonderful thing is that there are people doing this in almost every climate so there is knowledge all over the place (finding it can be difficult though).

Here are a few ideas I'm toying with for passive water collection

• The obvious one is rain water collection
• using an atmospheric water condenser ($$$)
• fog nets (only work in humid climates)
• cisterns below frost line with large air funnels (tons of work, but should work in dryer climates if placed correctly). I'm working on a prototype or proof of concept currently and hope to build one next summer.

I'm very open to more ideas or places to look for more information on this topic, do you know a great way of passive water collection?

image sources 1,2,3,4