Hi I'm Zachrey Helmberger and my wife, Nicole, and I live at the Greater World Community Subdivision.
All the homes out here are completely "off-the-grid", except for a propane tank for cooking and water heating or backup water heating. The homes are passively heated by the sun with a "fail-safe" temperature of 58 degrees F (i.e. it never gets below this temperature even if we have heavy overcast for a week in the dead of winter. We are at 7,000 feet altitude so nights get pretty cold just about any time of the year. Private wells are not allowed on our lots. However, there is a solar powered well with a 10,000 gallon tank for fire fighting purposes and emergency backup for the earthship style homes in case of severe drought.
The part I really like about the earthships at Greater World are the water systems. We catch all of our domestic water on our metal roof which flow into cisterns (we have 3,600 gallons of plastic underground cistern storage capacity). The fresh water is filtered for washing and we also have a drinking water filter for our little drinking water taps at each sink or vanity.
The used water drains into a contained greywater planter that runs, pretty much, the entire length of our 72 foot long house. Almost the entire south face of our house is double pane glass windows. The plants take up the greywater and produce a pleasant humidity level in the home and produce some oxygen and take up nitrates from the greywater.
The toilet is flushed with filtered greywater instead of the freshwater. There is very little odor and the water is nearly as clear as fresh water. The resulting blackwater drains into a conventional outdoor septic tank and the effluent or excess water from the septic goes into a contained outdoor blackwater planter cell. We have trees, grass and even crops growing like crazy in the blackwater planter during the summer. The new mexico locust tree shows explosive growth rates in these planters.
We don't have a lot of photovoltaic panels, as one might expect for an "off the grid" home. We have 4 BP150 (150 watt) photovoltaic panels which can produce almost 600 watts at high noon. We have eight L16 six Volt batteries that provide us with plenty of power if you use power wisely (turning off unused lights, avoid or minimize use of hair dryers, toasters, anything with electric heating elements in them, etc). We have a SunFrost RF-16 fridge/freezer that cost an arm and a leg but it saved us from getting more panels and more batteries so in the long run, I think we come out ahead.
We love our home and the indoor greywater planters even provide us with some food (tomatoes, cantaloupe, zucchini, beets, lettuce, squash, etc). It is amazing how the temperature inside the house stays in nearly the exact same range all year 'round. We get highs in the mid 80's and lows in the low 60's when we are in bed. So we sleep well and it is REALLY quiet since there are no moving parts (no furnace, no blowers, no radiant floor heating hoses to break, no fumbling with the thermostat in the middle of the night, etc).
This type of home can work in just about any climate from Bolivia to Scotland to Montana and Canada. Stop by our website:
www.greaterworld.org
to find out more about our subdivision and see some pictures of the blackwater planter, the storm-water fed vegetable bed, etc). We also have nightly and weekly rentals out here and links are provided at our website...
Thanks!
Zac Helmberger
water management
Hi Zac! Well, I suppose I'll start off with some questions I have for you. Water management is a big issue for anyone trying to live sustainably, but especially true for you folks out in the desert. Given your weather, do you frequently run into any water management issues, and how do you resolve them? Also, what methods do you use for growing your plants and how much are you able to produce?
Water Management
Hi PE,
Water management is almost a daily affair. There are filters to clean, mice, frogs and crickets to keep out of the cisterns, and lines to keep thawed. Each year we come up with better ways to get things done, hopefully for good.
Calendar year 2006 saw 12.80" of precip at the subdivision (I am a volunteer for www.CoCoRaHS.org Community Collaborative Rain and Hail and Snow study). This is not a lot of precip, but it is a lot more than the ancient Nabateans got in the Negev desert in Israel and they grew orchards, grapes, veggies, etc. I figure if the Nabateans can feed themselves on less than 6" a year, we should be able to do so on 12" a year. The trick is to catch stormwater runoff and store it in covered tanks, cisterns, covered ponds or ?? until the spring planting season (we get most of our precip during the late July/early August monsoon season).
One of our biggest problems is uncontrolled stormwater runoff. It can flood our homes if we are not careful about building and maintaining berms, swales, catchment ponds, etc. This is also an opportunity to guide potentially damaging water into vegetable beds and catchment ponds to percolate down to the water table. The soil out here has virtually no organic matter and when water hits it, it immediately runs off with little soaking in. So management of runoff is key to protecting your home.
There is much more to talk about but I need to get to bed now! Let me know what is unanswered so far and I will fill in the gaps!
Cheers,
Zachrey Helmberger
Subsistence farmer in training
Greater World Earthship Subdivision
Wow, beautiful stuff. A
Wow, beautiful stuff. A little inspiration for my plans of building sustainable housing. 8 acres on the east coast of Florida, and after the tree farm moves on, I may yet be able to convince the owners to make it a sustainable subdivision... in 5 years I think that kind of design will be commonplace. The differences in design protocols for this location might be vast though. We have 33 more inches of rain to manage and hurricanes to worry about, and no hills.
Roof Specs
Hi Zachrey and thanks for contributing to Peak Oil Design!
I've read about earthships before, and have always admired the wise use (and re-use) of water.
My question is what type of roofing material you have -- is it stainless steel?
Rain and roof specs
Hi Jade and Anonymous,
I definitely envy the 33" of rain per year in Florida! That is enough precip to grow crops without supplemental irrigation, assuming it falls reasonably consistently during the growing season.
Earthships, due to the heavy tire construction and berms, can withstand an incredible amount of abuse. The roof might go bye bye but the basic structure will remain after a hurricane.
Jade:
The roof is propanel metal roofing. It is a painted metal product made by
http://www.metalsales.us.com/
I'm still not sure what the paint is and what if anything leaches out of it when it gets rained on. But suffice it to say that the amount of time the water spends on the metal is so small that I'm not really concerned.
The trickiest part is getting the water into the cistern with the least junk such as crickets, mouse poop, rabbit raisins, tumbleweeds, frogs, lizards, etc. Everybody loves water out here and it can be a real challenge to keep them out of the giant funnel on top of the cistern manhole.
Our house has these giant funnels that are placed on top of the manhole of our cisterns. They are typically filled with gravel and have a 4" stove pipe in the middle of the funnel such that there is about 6" inches of water standing in the funnel (pipe is perforated six inches above the point where the funnel and the pipe meet). It is also open on the top in case we get a massive downpour (it also has a bit of window screen on top to keep out the mosquitos). I think this reservoir helps reduce the amount of silt that makes it into the cistern (it slowly fills up the small reservoir created by the funnel and the central pipe).
My latest tweak has a cone made on 1/4" hardware cloth on top of the funnel to keep the mice from hanging out on the nice warm, humid window screen on top of the pipe and pooping all over it (on really cold nights when it gets below zero, the only place outside that is relatively warm is the top of the pipe in the cistern funnel). I also removed the gravel so that it is easier to remove the silt when it gets full.
The devil's in the details, as usual! ;-)
Zachrey Helmberger
Subsistence farmer in training
Greater World Earthship Subdivision