A Brief Introduction to Earthships - Houses of Ingenuity (feat. Taos Builders Guided Video Tour)

Building shelter has been one of man's highest priorities since we started to settle places.

Houses shield us against the weather and the cold, they provide a place of gathering for our family and tribe and they allow us to live in an environment where humidity and temperature are not a constant threat to our health. And as different as human dwellings are, the need to build seems to come quite natural to human beings - it's almost like we instinctively know that shelter is a must for life on Earth.

Just like any other species that builds their burrows, nests and shelters.

But while different cultures and tribes have historically built their dwellings in a variety of ways, there has been a certain trend of insanity in the "modern" world when it comes to how we build our houses in light of everything we know about construction and energy today, what features those houses have and how we are blatantly disregarding nature's potential for building a dwelling that enables a life of self-determination, health and abundance for both human beings and nature, instead of ensuring a life of debt-servitude and costly maintaining of our "homes" that hardly deserve to be labeled as such.

The moment we realize Earthships exist we are painfully confronted with the utter level of inefficiency humanity still utilizes in 2018 to build houses. Come along for this most magnificent WTF discovery or scroll to the end of this article for an awesome Earthship tour, teaching us a thing or two about how an actual home is made.

At the risk of boring you all to death with something you are long familiar with, this article is aimed at people who have never heard about the existence of Earthships.

No-brainer houses

I really wish I would have heard about Earthships much sooner than I did. When I was a kid it seemed weird to me that houses constructed half a century ago were basically still the standard template for how a house is generally built. 4 concrete walls, one roof, small windows, fossil fuel heating underneath the windows and no built-in mechanisms to provide for our basic human needs.

Yes, if the water is running you can flush the toilet, if you have paid your electrical bill to some shady corporation you can have power for your appliances and if you went shopping you are privileged to eat... but those are all external sources, meaning they require constant expenditure, effort and investment to be secured while our basic needs pretty much remain the same throughought our lifetime.

If this is so, wouldn't it be much smarter to include our needs and their being met right from the get-go? If you think it is, we totally agree. This is precisely what Earthships have been designed to provide for their owners and I never get tired of drawing attention to these amazing - yet little known - types of houses that help human beings with pretty much every aspect of their existence. Including amazing aesthetics.

House of dirt

Earthships are earthquake- and tornado resistant houses that are constructed in a very different way to "classical" houses we are all familiar with. The idea is to use reasonable local materials (trash) and the Earth to construct a more liveable and efficient building in line with nature and her processes.

An Earthship's walls are formed by several stacked rows of worn-out car tires where dirt is pounded into with a hammer. These massive "tire bricks" do not only make excellent walls, they have enormous mass!

You see, as opposed to regular houses, Earthships make use of their own physical features in order to provide beneficial effects to its inhabitants. Where regular houses have thin walls that cool off fast and don't save any energy for later, the tire-dirt-walls in Earthships act as a thermal battery to warm and cool the house passively.

If you have ever gone to a lake in fall you will be familiar with the phenomenon of thermal mass - the air may be cold already but the water is still "heated up" from all the sunshine of the recent summer.

The same happens in an Earthship: Walls and floors (the carriers of thermal mass) are carefully mapped out and orientied to the angle of the sun so that the sun's energy will heat them up during the day like a giant heat-battery. The excess heat will be given off during the night all by itself to keep the Earthship around 71°F during the whole year, depending on the build and your climate zone. No external heating needed. Wow.

And while this may sound cute, practice has shown that this passive use of thermal mass is incredibly successful to provid the hosue with a more or less constant temperature throughout the year, depending on location, climate and of course the type of Earthship built.

Remind me again why we constantly pay for heating our houses? Right, because our houses don't conserve any heat - they sling it back to nature due to their obsolete method of construction, disregarding thermal mass and a holistic engineering approach for integrated systems.

Food palace

But of course, there are other needs we care about. For one, human beings need food, ideally in a way that makes us less dependent on questionable external sources and more dependent on what we can produce ourselves in a healthy manner.

Organic food production is a prime function of any true Earthship out there and it's inspiring to see the multitude of strategies used to achieve exactly that.

Fruits and veggy plants are often growing indoors next to the large window front where they provide the inhabitants with food of high quality, purify the air inside the house and help filter the water. There are amazing Earthship-builds that have been specialized for fish and food production but there are also Earthships that feature additional gardens outside where more sturdy and rigid plants are growing that come and go with the seasons.

The idea ultimately becomes to be able to pick your veggies and fruits when you need them, and to enjoy them for their high quality, instead of buying items that have been shipped halfway around the Earth after going through the "regular" growth period of pesticide and herbicide contamination.

_{Indoor garden in reaching distance while dining, awesome!}

Water cycles

Rainwater is collected through the roof of an Earthship, then filtered and eventually stored in a strorage basin to supply all places in and around the Earthship with water when needed.

The way an Earthship makes use of water is as efficient as it is mindblowing: Water is not used once or twice, but often three times, even four times... inside the house for different applications.

The cleanest water will be used for drinking, cooking, showering, etc before it goes to help with other things around the house. Is it really smart to use 4 gallons of pure drinking water to flush our toilets? Nope. Why don't we use the water instead that has been used for cooking or washing our hands before?

Well, an Earthship does exactly that. It has hierachies of water-cycles built in that recycle the collected rainwater constantly before it it stored as "black water" and eventually used to fertilize the garden. Smart!

Here we see the water-runoff-system that collects rainwater from the roof using the whole surface of the Earthship.

Power generation - only limited by our understanding

Earthships utilize all osrts of renewable energy sources, depending on local conditions and - of course - the state of knowledge. Traditional Earthships are built with solar panels, some utilize wind power. But as we find back to long-hidden technologies, the ways of creating power off-grid will only increase the more hidden knowledge is rediscovered.

Earthships usually run on battery system voltage and use power-conserving appliances, especially for the power-hungry applications like fridge/freezer. New methods of power generation would be seamlessly integrated into the design of the Earthship to maximize potential, here's an info graphic about an Earthship's basic layout. there are many different models, depending on what its inhabitants require, but they are all similar in their basic building methods used.

There are so many things to be said about Earthships, but I get the feeling that most of you will be familiar with Earthships already, and that no amount of words can do this human invention justice.

Because of this I want to share the best Earthship tour video I have found over the years, where we are invited to check out several of these awesome houses from the inside, learn a lot about how Earthships are constructed by using recycled materials and natural building materials, and how life in an Earthship can be marvellously rewarding when compared to building a "classic" house in constant need of maintenance and with eternal bills attached.

So without further ado, here is the aforementioned Earthship-tour showcasing different builds and layouts in the original Earthship community in Taos, New Mexico. Please tell me you still want to live in a "normal" house after seeing this, I can't find any good reason ;)

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