>>MAT: Hey everyone! In this video, we're going to be visiting the Darfield earthship
and meeting up with Mark, the caretaker,
who is going to give us a tour and share his experience living in the earthrship for almost 2 years now.
Mark is also a structural engineer who's worked on several earthships.
And in this video, he's going to share some really valuable information
for anyone thinking of building something similar.
Let's go meet up with him and find out more.
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>>MARK: One of the nicest things is waking up here quietly on my own with the sun
in the summer, and going to sleep with the sun,
and literally just opening my eyes and looking outside at the garden.
In the 1960-1970s,
there was an architect named Michael Reynolds down in Taos,
New Mexico, who developed this concept of an Earthship.
Full blown one's will incorporate water harvesting;
will grow food; will deal with their own waste,
including greywater; build with natural and recycled materials;
will moderate their temperature passively; and also have natural ventilation.
My definition of an Earthship is anything that incorporates bits and pieces of that because
you see different Earthships all over the place.
People have different needs and wants and they take all sorts of shapes and sizes.
The Darfield Earthship is British Columbia's first permitted Earthship.
It was built nearly a decade ago and has been occupied the entire time. It was done by a family of 5.
They used to run an old log building company on site here.
So they did their own timber milling themselves and had workshops
to have people come and help out.
It's built with their own hands and with the help of a whole bunch of other people.
The owners had an opportunity to move to Toronto and see what living in the city was like.
I've known them for a few years because there's not a lot of
structural engineers getting into Earthships.
They asked me if I would caretake it as they explored their next adventure
and I said, yes. I've been really curious about a) Living rurally
because there's this big romantic idea of what it's like to homestead
and I could actually sink myself into one.
I've touched a handful of Earthships over the years.
I've been here for about 1-3/4 years. Gone through my first winter and
I am gearing up for the second one.
When the owners set out to build this,
one of the priorities in mind was to eliminate long term maintenance costs, and budget and finances were
firmly set. There's a number of things in here that aren't finished 100%.
But it is totally functional and the owners are really practical people. I actually really admire them for that.
You'll notice when you first come in that there is these U shapes.
Those are car tires packed with dirt, stacked like bricks, and
if you arch them like that,
then they are stable if they behave as a retaining wall.
What you don't see is that there's actually a whole bunch of soil behind that.
So we're semi underground once you step in here.
The house is actually made up of these units of U shapes.
On top of the car tires is a
base plaster. It's an earthen plaster.
It's the same mix as like a cob. It's a sand, clay, and chopped straw.
Usually, there would be a finished plaster on top of that
but it hasn't been done yet.
The floor is made similarly. It's an earthen floor,
again straw, sand and clay.
In the main room, we've also got a rocket mass heater
with its chimney pipe actually going horizontally through the bench. So when you light your fire,
the draw goes up and then horizontal with the intention of warming up the bench
so that you're not evacuating all the precious heat that
you've just generated from the fire.
It's probably under sized for this size of house.
My guess is it probably makes a degree difference and in the winter,
I'll be strategic about compartmentalizing different rooms.
When the sun does come up, on the days that there isn't all this low lying valley cloud,
it will jump up to 24 degrees in here.
So I will be in a t-shirt midday and I will tough that out
in an effort to store the heat and make my night a little bit more comfortable.
This one actually has a bit of a reveal
with the intention of allowing some more
immediate heat to radiate outward. The rest of it gets stored.
One of the issues with it is that you're stuffing it with 13-14 inch pieces of wood.
When it draws, it's really roaring. It's probably only a 30 minute burn, maybe 40.
This is an older variation of an earthship, but we have
low lying operable windows there. In the back of all the U shaped modules,
we have operable skylights that we can open. When I open those up
and open up the doors and the other windows, you can actually feel convective flow going.
You can feel the wind going over you just from that ventilation. This Earthship
doesn't have an overhang on the front.
I think it would be nice to have the temperature be a little bit more manageable in
the hot peaks in the summer. I think an overhang would actually go a long way.
There's a bathroom here. There's actually 2 bathrooms in the Earthship.
Right now, this is the only one that has a shower in it. It doesn't have finished plasters on it.
You can see that it's got pop can and bottle walls.
Those should actually be covered with a brown coat of base plaster similar to the tire walls.
After that, you could do a finish plaster.
This is the guest bedroom.
We have a nice big king size bed and a room to themselves.
Everything in here is pretty open concept
and that's important in the design of this one
for ventilation purposes because it can get stuffy in here in the winter
otherwise because you tend to want to keep everything closed up.
I got these makeshift curtains that partition things off.
This is the kitchen. We have
electric stove, really fancy hood vent. There's a
freezer that was converted into a fridge because its insulation is a little bit "beefier".
It's going to be more efficient. It's also a chest which means you don't dump all of your
cold air out every time you open it. The back side of it, there's a
cold storage room with all the canning supplies. The freezer is back there,
pantry, dehydrators and all sorts of stuff.
We have a second bathroom here.
A soaker tub is planned to go in
but basically all it has is a toilet and a sink.
This is the electrical room.
We've got a panel in there and then also we have a pressure tank from the well water at the back there.
It's wired for AC and DC as far as I know.
It would be easy to switch over when they want to.
This is the room that I've been in.
There used to be 2 beds in here and the girls would share this room but I've been in here.
ever since. This is where I dry my laundry
because I don't have a dryer. I have a washing machine though. The greywater planter trench continues here.
It's along the entire south side of the Earthship.
You couldn't get occupancy in the building by just leaving it bare.
They hadn't done the greywater planter yet and they wanted to move in.
A prerequisite to being able to occupy the building was to board it up
so that it wouldn't be a fall hazard there anymore.
Last year, I actually turned this into a nursery.
So I could get a head start on my garden outside.
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People get into earthships for different reasons.
Chris and Sandra one of their drivers was finances and they're very practical people.
Along the way there were compromises made. One of them was the sighting of this Earthship.
There was a septic tank there and there was power running up to here already.
There was also pre-existing well water on site because they already had it.
So there's all these things that were already in place before they decided to build it.
And they used it.
This Earthship is on grid.
We've got well water.
We're on a septic system.
But it's set up and designed so that it could keep on moving forward to becoming like a full blown Earthship.
There's an empty trench in the front. It's plumbed.
It's prepared to receive greywater from the bathrooms.
They are placed up against the windows so that you could gravity feed those intentionally.
The roof is set up to collect rainwater.
There's plans for cisterns in the drawings.
The electricity grid is right beside the highway and
fortunately in British Columbia carbon profile on energy is basically zero out here. It's really, really small.
It's not necessarily a lot value for your money to switch over to solar.
I think one of the primary functions of an Earthship is incorporating passive solar design
which is basically the idea of
maximizing your solar gain in the winter months when it's coldest and minimizing your solar gain
in the summer months.
So you're trying to keep the building warm naturally in the winter and trying to keep it cool naturally in the summer.
It does that by having all these south facing windows
that are actually angled so that when the sun is the lowest in the winter,
the sun rays hit that perpendicular and you're actually getting
solar gain pretty much right to the back of the building.
You're naturally just collecting all of that in this earthen materials
with that radiant energy being stored in it.
Today, you can actually feel it warmer in the south side than it is in the north side.
Behind the car tire walls,
we actually have another 4 feet or so of soil before you have insulation.
On the other side of this, there's actually insulation below the earthen slab.
So all of that heat comes in, charges that up, sun goes down, and the heat escapes back into the space.
Here in Darfield, it's not unheard of for it to be -30 overnight.
We're actually in a bit of a low lying valley. So we actually don't get a lot of solar gain.
I'd say on average in the winter, it's about 16 degrees in here on its own.
What that means is that I can leave for weeks at a time without worrying about things freezing in here
which is a game changer when you're living rurally.
Most passive solar design is done anecdotally.
You'll hear people in Earthship-land say that an Earthship works absolutely everywhere.
I would say that it works but maybe not that well in some areas.
It's not a silver bullet solution
and passive solar design is similar.
You do need good temperature swing; and you need thermal mass; and you need to orient it correctly.
The only way to tell is to energy model it because everybody is in different microclimates.
Energy modelling is basically
software analysis during the design phase of a building that will
predict a particular energy performance of your building.
There's some softwares that just look at insulation thicknesses and call it good.
There's other softwares that can account for sun angles, micro climates,
and then it spits out, whether or not your interior climate and temperatures are appropriate for your area.
You can predict that before you get into construction and take some of the guesswork out.
You could Google energy modelers. There's professionals out there that have these softwares.
I've been working with a company called Associated Engineering.
They have the fanciest energy modelling software out there and they've been really great
to help us understand how these things work.
Biggest disadvantage in this Earthship, I think, is that
the rocket mass heater is a pain
which has been interesting because there's a lot of romance around rocket mass heaters as well.
But if it's just me and I don't have a lot of sun in the winter,
I'm taking care of it quite often and that eats up a lot of my time.
The original plans had another wood stove on the other side of it as well.
They would have 2 wood stoves. This came as an afterthought and they decided to try it out.
Another disadvantage, which isn't obvious to me because I'm
largely here on my own but it's very open.
I haven't had an issue with many of my guests
but you can hear everything that's going on all of the time,
even if you're in the bathroom.
And if you're not comfortable having a shower facing the garden
that can be a bit of an issue.
You could put a blind up if you wanted to. Socially, it's a bit interesting.
A lot of people come here and ask: can you even build these? how is this possible?
They're illegal. There's so much red tape. They're not code compliant. A normal
prescriptive residence looks like 2x6s at whatever center, put this much insulation and
do this for electrical and plumbing and call it good!
As soon as you start going outside of what those are,
the building code requires you to bring in registered professionals to take
responsibility for each of those aspects. So if you're building with car tires,
there's no prescription for how to build with car tires
but the code allows you to retain a structural engineer to design it as a gravity retaining wall and
as long as it can meet the same performance that any other structure would
then you can use it and that professional takes responsibility for it.
Similarly with envelope issues like using an earthen plaster or pop bottles, different insulation materials,
if there's no prescription for it in the code, doesn't mean that you can't do it!
It means you need to hire somebody to take professional responsibility for it,
either an envelope consultant or an architect.
It can kind of go on from there depending on what
non prescriptive systems you're putting in there.
It's really important to equip yourselves with the right people to help you design this.
It's also not a one size fits all solution. At the end of the day, it's a custom home.
Start thinking that you're building a custom home.
If you're really, really savvy; and you have the resources;
and you've got the skill sets required; and the right people come into your life at the right time;
you might be able to bring that cost down and that effort down.
But at the end of the day, you're still building a home and a pretty complex
one at that with a lot of systems that aren't standard. If those aren't executed well,
then I think you'll have problems and that could be a really big disadvantage.
But just like you're building a normal home, you should pay attention to all of those details.
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One of the coolest and unsuspecting advantages is I've increased
my observation of what's going on outside
because my daily life depends on what the weather is like.
I'll check to see what the forecast is and I'll open or close the windows. That is
part of my daily pattern and behaviour now,
which is nice because I feel I'm more in tune with what's going on outside.
It's not a measurable advantage but I think it's really, really cool.
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If you want to get in touch with Mark and find out more about the Darfield Earthship,
we'll put links down below in the description.
Also, if you're interested in Earthships, we've visited quite a few over the past few years.
So you can check out our Earthship video playlist also linked down below.
Please share this video if you liked it, be sure to subscribe, and thanks for watching.