eco bricks

Building a laundry/ bath house with old tires, eco bricks and mud/ cement – part one; underway

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The small excavator has been and gone (what a wonderful little machine it is) leaving a trail of half finished projects in its wake. The pad for the laundry/ bath house is dug out, levelled and a swale dug up hill to slow water flow down the slope and under the building. We also dug a spare toilet pit (for possible future use) and made a tank pad near the house for the 5000 gallon tank, then moved the big tank into place.
That has left me with piles of soil all over the place, some of which will be used to mix with cement and fill the foundation tires for the laundry. The best of that soil is destined to become the next section of my Hugelkultur beds and fill various planters around the place.

Rabbitto and a guinea fowl watch as the excavator digs the pad for the laundry

The laundry project has begun
The old tank on the humpy

Digging down so the bigger tank will fit under the gutter

The big tank which fits perfectly, but does dominate the front yard. Yes it oes tilt slightly down hill; the sand base sunk on that side.

Obviously part one of the laundry/ bath house project is not finished yet, but it has begun and I hope to have the foundations down by next weekend (‘hope to’ doesn’t always equal’will’ though). What an exciting time I am having at the moment.

Building a laundry/bath house with old tyres, eco bricks and mud/cement – part one; planning

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We need a real kitchen…at the moment our kitchen is cobbled together from bits of unused furniture (my bench space is an old massage table) and a sink unit I was given. My partner’s brother was given an old modular kitchen (from the 70’s, so it will have some interesting colour combinations) which he is storing for us, but we can’t put it in the humpy until we have a floor to put it on, which involves moving the current bathroom out.
The current bathroom has a floor made from an metal old window shade (one of those industrial metal grid things) with sheets of aluminium screwed onto it and lino over the top. This all has to come out (as well as the bath) and a new tire and ply floor go in. This means that we need a new bathroom away from the humpy while we build.

This is the current floor, you can see the metal frame around the lino. Not pretty, but it works.

The bathroom floor (please ignore the dirty shower curtain) 

The plan is to build a laundry/bath house up the slope from the vegetable growing area so that all that lovely (nutrient rich) water can use gravity to find it’s way back to the Hugelkultur vegetable beds, instead of being carried out in buckets which is how I do it at the moment. Eventually there will be a shower in the house also (for those cold winter nights), but until then we will have the bath house. I want to have a go at building with old tyres and my eco bricks, because we have plenty of them around and because they create a negative carbon footprint when reused for building.

My plan so far is very simple;

 As usual my madness is being fueled by Youtube and internet research;
Technical tests on walls
Building with eco bricks
General information about Earthships (not exactly what I’m building)
Alternative building methods
The plan is to use a small excavator (hired for the occasion) to dig the foundation out (amongst other things), put the strip footing (tires and mud) and the four corner poles in. Then we will put up the pole frame and the roof. After that comes the corrugated iron outer walls, the floor and the bath put in (complete with outlet to drain to the vegetable garden). The first layer of eco bricks will go in around then too, but we will have to keep chipping away at the inner walls as eco bricks become available (we only make one or two per week). Getting water into the laundry for washing is easy; we will tap into the pipe running from the header tank up the hill to the humpy, and let gravity do it’s thing. Getting water for the shower is another story as the fall is not great enough to gravity feed water to an overhead shower. That is a problem for part two.

Next comes getting the shower operational and putting up a new clothes line. Look out for part two.

                       

Eco bricks; Making use of rubbish

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Lately I have been thinking about rubbish; specifically the plastic and foil bits that seem to be wrapped around everything these days. We have no rubbish pick up here. No magic bin that mysteriously empties itself if I leave it by the road on a Tuesday night. We take our rubbish to the dump in the trailer and pay for the privilege of leaving it there (we also pay $150 a year to maintain the local dump on our rates). So I have started to think about ways to reduce our rubbish production.

We buy in bulk where we can and I send refillable containers to the local co-operative to be filled up with washing powder and detergent. Glass, recyclable plastic containers, aluminium and tin cans are taken to a recycling centre periodically. Food scraps, paper and cardboard are used in the chook pen for composting. That only leaves that annoying plastic; plastic wrap, Styrofoam trays, chip packets, chocolate wrappers and plastic bags. We commonly fill about one grain bag (20 litre size)  per week of non-recyclable plastic.

 I think I have found a solution at last;

Eco bricks. They have been used to build schools and houses in third world countries for a few years now and provide a handy way of getting rid of rubbish that would otherwise go into landfill.

Basically they involve stuffing clean plastic rubbish really tightly into PET bottles until they are full and hard, then put the cap back on. I have been making them for about two months now and have managed to produce about two a week. I never thought I would be thankful for my partner’s coca cola habit, but he manages to provide just enough bottles to keep up with the plastic we produce.

Step one; collect all the clean plastic rubbish you can (wash it if you have to)
Step two; using a stick or an old knitting needle, shove the plastic rubbish down into the bottle.

 Pack it down tight.

Keep filling until you can’t jam any more in, then put the cap back on.

Stock pile them somewhere and use them to build.

Beautiful buildings like this.

Maybe I will collect enough to build the toilet out of them…….

Is this idea too crazy?? Can I get the local council to approve? What do you think?