Earthship construction: Day 2

Today the cooling tubes arrived. Cooling tubes are usually 20 foot long galvanized metal pipes, 10″ in diameter, that are buried in the earth and enter each room through one of the first few courses of tires.

They arrived just in time.

We are pounding tires at a rate that requires constant back bury. The galvanized metal tubes that we had originally found got held up in Costa Rica. So instead of four reasonably priced thin metal tubes, we ended up with two very thick, and expensive, steel tubes that took 15 people to lift.

They’ll work great, and will pay off quickly when one considers the price of electricity to run air-conditioning. It will be nice to have more time to arrange for a less expensive tube, even if we have to deal with importing it. The tubes really should be metal, although a thin plastic would work, to conduct the coolness of the earth.

We pounded at least four more rows of tires all the way around. So far, Mike Reynolds has taken to teaching the local Nicaraguan crew while the other ten from Taos have hammered out tires at an impressive, albeit expected rate. The Nica crew, made up of 13 community members, has been keeping a good pace with the Earthship professionals.

One of the two 10,000 liter cisterns arrived today. Even though we receive 130″ of annual rain, San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua is essentially a desert for five months a year, so we’ll need two cisterns to carry this one bedroom home through the dry season. It actually doesn’t seem like that much water, but when you consider that an Earthship will recycle its water several times, it becomes more than reasonable.

The quest for larger tires (R15s and R16s) is tricky down here. In fact, finding any tire is slightly complicated due to the fact that the tire places are required to dispose of discarded tires immediately. Discarded tires collect water which creates a breeding habitat for mosquitoes. The problem is that when these tires are discarded, they are immediately burned amongst plastic bottles and other human byproducts at the municipal dump.

Today our last shipment of tires arrived. By the time this first house is complete, we will have saved nearly 1,000 tires from cremation.

Morale is good despite the heat and the skills transfer between the teams is working well. There is a great deal of pride in this project from both the Taos Team and the Equipo Carrizal (the local trainees). Tonight we had dinner at the “Chicken Lady”. There is nothing better than a cold beverage, gallo pinto (local rice and bean dish), sweet bananas and chicken cooked on a wood fire grill.

All in all, it was a pretty solid second day.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 3:25 am and is filed under Earthship construction: Day by Day, Green real estate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.