'Recycled' Solar Homes

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

This dwelling is also built into a four-foot-deep pit ... with dirt piled high around the perimeter of the excavation. The half-buried structure is well protected against the frigid winters in Taos, but there are some other advantages as well to this "semi-underground" method of construction.

"The cost of the pit is less than the expense of maintaining outside walls," the young designer explains. "Besides, landscaped pits can add a pleasant, sheltered exterior environment to a home."

The walls of the house are essentially staggered rows of tires, into which dry earth has been poured and tamped. The first time Mike tried to build such a wall, he stacked the tires in columns ... and the structure promptly fell over. Undeterred, he tried again, this time stacking them in staggered rows ... and this method worked! Now, Reynolds wires every third row together—for extra stability— and covers the walls with metal lath to hold the plaster in place.

Mike's tire walls are simple to build, but involve a lot of physical labor all the same. The solar-heated "pit" house, for example, required over 1,000 tires ... each of which consumed two wheelbarrow loads of dry earth. Such labor-intensive construction accounts for the building's high selling price of $55,000.

Reynolds explains: "I had a good crew that I didn't want to lay off, so I paid skilled masons and carpenters $7.00 an hour to pour dirt. Now that I 'know the ropes', however, I could put up another house like it for $15,000 to $20,000. And, conceivably, a person could do much of his or her own work and cut the cost still more!"

ROOM IN THE ROUND

The Taos tire house (which has roughly 1,025 square feet of floor space) is circular in shape ... and there's a good reason for that. "Walls built from tires should follow a free form curve for solidity," the designer points out. "In fact, this kind of wall is so massive it requires a curved form for maximum strength."

To fill in spaces not reached by the tires, Mike built walls of bottles and cans ... with the bottoms of the containers left exposed for a decorative effect.

The fireplace that backs up the solar heating system consists of an open hearth topped by two 55-gallon drums that are welded vertically end to end. The bottom one-third of this unit forms a hood that traps heat and conducts smoke to the chimney. The remaining steel column is sealed and filled with water ... to serve both as a heat reservoir and as a hot water source to supplement the roof-mounted solar hot water heater.

One of the house's two large solar collectors also provides enough greenhouse space and rock planters to allow the future occupants to grow most of their own vegetables. But Reynolds feels that gardens are important for more than food and decoration.

"Plants are natural air conditioners," he notes. "They inhale the carbon dioxide that we breathe out, and—in return—they exhale oxygen."

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print