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How? "Hired a water witch," says Reynolds with a shrug, referring to a local dowser.

From the beginning, Reynolds felt that the key to his search lay in combining an accessible building material with natural energy sources such as sun and wind. In the early '70s, when Charles Kuralt began broadcasting footage of streets and fields all across America littered with beverage cans, it occurred to Reynolds that this abundantly available resource could be used as a building material.

He began by baling cans with wire into small blocks. The design was patented but never really utilized because it was too labor intensive. Instead, he began laying cans directly into cement mortar, using them as bricks themselves. At first, the cans-in-mortar construction was used to fill in between posts in more traditional post-and-beam construction. This evolved into using cans alone in dome-style construction. Exterior walls consist of two rows of cans separated by an air space filled with insulation, then mudded over.

Building the Perfect Battery: Your House

The trick is to capture energy. Since matter is essentially stored energy, it can be defined as a battery. The denser the matter-mass, the more stored energy is present. Iron is denser than tin, hence the skillet stays hotter longer than the tin pan. Air has no mass, therefore no ability to retain temperature. Conventional houses have very little mass and, therefore, must be insulated to retain temperature. In a Reynolds house, or Earthship, the walls themselves, because of their extremely concentrated mass, retain temperature. More than keeping cool or warm air in the walls becomes, according to Reynolds, the primary cooling or heating source. The secondary source is the sun, or in extremely dark environments, gas heat.

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