At the Library Last Night

When we were getting ready to build our earthship, Rick and I were desperate to talk to anyone who had lived in one or built one. Touring the ones in Taos and taking the three day workshop with Michael Reynolds was great but that was a business and we wanted the perspective of folks who were doing it on their own.  Ann Landman and Dave Dashner who gave us tours of their homes and advice on their experiences were a huge help. So, we decided to give back. Last night, at the New Castle Branch Library, we presented a couple of short videos I made several years ago about how our house works. We showed images of the building process and what it looks like now and talked about our experience. It was an enjoyable evening spent with folks who care about leaving the earth in the best condition possible, lowering their consumption of fossil fuels, and living responsibly while enjoying the beauty of the outdoors. Really enjoyed meeting so many awesome folks.

A couple of recent kitchen photos.

Leaping Lizard Earthship Available for Vacation Rental

Well, I finally have it posted. We are accepting guests to experience earthship living and enjoy the beauty that is Leaping Lizard Ranch at Ladder Canyon.

Stay in the Earthship

We are going to be making our earthship available as a vacation rental. Watch for updates or email me dherald @ me.com for info.

Raising the Panels

The Autumnal Equinox occurs this week which means the sun has hit the point where it is low enough in the sky that the angle of the solar panels needs to be changed to harvest the most energy from the sun.

Yesterday was a gorgeous day with the sun shining and the wildflowers blooming so Rick and our grandson Jack went up on the roof of the earthship to move the panels to their winter angle.

Meanwhile, SophieTom took a dip in one of the rock depressions on the edge of the canyon.

From the front of the house you really can't see the photovoltaic panels because the ground slopes down quite a bit before hitting the canyon edge. If you peer carefully between the two cedars you can see a little bit of the raised panels. The panels visible to the left of the trees are the hot water panels that keep the earthship toasty all winter with in-floor radiant heat. Those panels are not lowered during the summer because we don't heat the floor then.

I love our home!

Status Update

Just realized I haven't posted in a very long time. Money got pretty tight with Rick and me both having jobs that evaporated. Last September I started working out of town and earlier this year we rented the earthship out to a good friend who is planning on building one and we moved into an apartment in an old log cabin.

We will be back. Meanwhile we remain dedicated to the tread lightly on the earth ethos of earthship life and are looking to build a tiny earthship near where I'm working which is about 80 miles away from our canyon, using all the things we learned from our life on the edge.

I will continue posting photos from the dozen years of building and living in our earthship.

One of the cool things Rick did last fall was to build his Happy Tractor Shed. He made it out of pallets and the cut off bark pieces from a saw mill. Good recycling effort.

Earthship Status

It has been an unusually mild dry summer and I got spoiled by the absence of biting bugs. The earthship continues to be very comfortable with night time temps around 70 and day time temps in the mid to high 70s. This last week has been extremely cloudy and we've gotten lots of rain. A neighbor measured .94 of an inch last week and yesterday's rainfall at a full inch falling in 30 minutes. After so many days of clouds with the sun not coming out of the clouds until 5 pm or so, we ended up running out of stored solar energy since the batteries weren't being charged all day, every day. It meant the generator came on this morning. Thankfully it has been a sunny day today so I don't expect the generator to go on again in the near future. Unfortunately this rain has hatched horrible biting flies.

The Heralds' Earthship Adventure

Living the Sustainable Life

We've built our dream home, an Earthship using plans purchased from architect Michael Reynolds, on the edge of a gorgeous Rocky Mountain canyon. Our sustainable home is off-grid, heated by the sun in winter and cooled by natural convection and sheltering from the sun in summer. Our electricity comes from the sun via solar panels and an inverter. We do have modern conveniences such as computers, internet, and a dishwasher. We even have a flush toilet in addition to a composting toilet so this is not roughing it at all. Our experiences with solar electricity were featured on Colorado Matters - to find it put 8-13-07 Off-the-Grid with Solar in the search box.

From the far side of the canyon.

Floors are acid stained concrete. Like most of the house, we did it ourselves. A little paint and some light fixtures make a world of difference. Many of the interior walls are made from cans or bottles set in a concrete or papercrete matrix.    Earthship Links Our house was part of the cover story in the May 2007 Beacon. It looks like the story disappeared when the June issue came out so I scanned it in. You can see it here. The article does have one glaring error, though. where it says "the home's internal temperature ranges from 58 in the winter to 78 in the summer" those are really the lows and highs. Our former conventional house used to drop down to 55 at night because that is where we set the thermostat. This house occassionally drops down to 58 in pre-dawn winter mornings at 7000 ft. altitude. As soon as the sun rises so does the temperature. I usually have to open the skylight and windows by 9am to keep it from getting too hot on those sunny winter days. So the article makes it sound chilly in here in the winter but it is exactly the opposite. Friends in town have been running their furnaces for a month now while we have only had one evening in the last month when we lit up the wood burning stove. In the last month it has usually been right around 70 degrees in the house when we retire for the night around 10pm. Earthship Biotecture - this is our architect and the inventor of Earthships High Noon Solar - this is our favorite supplier for solar and sustainable living stuff. Living Earth Construction - this is the guy who pounded our tires and helped us build our dream. Jason's and Ellen's Earthship Touch the Earth Ranch-house Earthship Landing The Knapp's Earthship Journey Scott & Janis Derrick's Earthship voyage

Rural living does have its drawbacks. Here is a letter I now send off with anything like rebates or catalog orders that state P.O. Box addresses are not accepted. You may be able to tell I'm a little bit ticked off by this discrimination against rural residents.

What Didi does in real life

 send email to me at: dherald at mac dot com

 

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Community

A few weeks ago a student came up to the reference desk and asked for help finding primary sources and scholarly articles about earthships. I was thrilled and told her Rick and I would be glad to be interviewed for her paper and invited her to come up for a tour. It was so nice this afternoon to visit with her and her family about our experiences in building and living in our home. Hopefully, if they do eventually build an earthship they can use some of the hard earned knowledge we acquired on this journey. They were able to share with us the three day Earthship Biotecture workshop they recently attended.

Earthship dwellers tend to not be overly social. We like being self sufficient. When we were embarking on our journey to build our earthship we really wanted to talk to people who lived in earthships and those who had built them. There were some wonderful people we met by going up and knocking on their doors who shared their wealth of information with us. We met another earthship family from standing in a supermarket line and the person behind us said she had friends who were building one, too.

Interior Photos Posted

Earth Day is almost over for the year but wouldn't the earth be a lot healthier if we all tried to make it Earth Day every day. In honor of the day, I finally uploaded some photos of the earthship's interior. Living in a sustainable house is a comfortable pleasure.

Earth Day

Earth Day makes me reflect on how happy I am with our earthship home. In previous years we've opened our house to tours but this year it didn't happen. So, if you were hoping for a tour, just email me at dherald at mac dot com. We are also happy to talk to folks who want to unplug from the grid or just live a more sustainable life.

Living off the grid is not as hard as some would imagine. Water is provided via snow, rain, frost and dew and stored in our cisterns. We have ample electricity for our needs--lights, water pressure tank, fridge, freezer, computers, printers, DVD player, stereo, etc. The house maintains a pleasant temperature, warm in winter and cool in summer.

I really appreciate the lack of city noises, the presence of bird song, the fresh scent of sage brush, and the constantly changing play of light and shadow on the far side of the canyon.

Our gate in winter.

Water Catching

All of our water is captured on our roof and stored in two 2500 gallon concrete cisterns. It works amazingly well and even in the midst of a drought we didn't run short. We do a lot of things around the house to conserve water. When we go below 70% in the cisterns we start using the composting toilet more but we do also have a traditional flush toilet.

I saw this short video (not thrilled with the pop ups that show up) but it was a beautifully produced segment on water in Tucson. Some really smart ideas.

I did a short vlog myself several years ago on how we deal with water for our earthship.

Watch for Big Changes

After 16 years of running the website where Herald's Earthship Adventure lived, I've decided to just move everything over to this blog. Should be interesting. The content from http://www.genrefluent.com/earthshi.htm will be moving here, to Life on the Edge.

Our home on the edge.

Passive cooling. The sun shades keep the sun from penetrating into the house now that it is moving lower in the sky. In the winter it will keep the earthship toasty but now, in August, with outside temps of 90 degrees we can do without the heat. The shades hang on cuphooks and will be taken down as soon as it starts getting chilly.

Sun shades and zuchinni.

Very Cool Solar

A thirteen-year-old used Fibonacci sequence to optimize a solar array. Very cool.

Great Walk

Left the earthship with Chaco at 9:30 this morning for a walk and walked up the road. Round trip walk was a little over an hour. In that time I passed no houses and saw 6 people, 4 dogs, and 2 trucks. All the people I saw were people I like, all neighbors, the dogs, too. Life on the edge is grand.

We are now in the cold season in the earthship. As the sun is higher in the sky it doesn't penetrate further than the gray water planters so  the house doesn't heat up. Nice in July but chilly in April. We are trying to get the in-floor solar powered radiant heat to work but having pump issues.

All in all life is good.

Xcel Commercials

Today I couldn't help but smirk when Rick was listening to the Broncos vs Jaguars game because there was this silly Xcel commercial about how much money this guy was saving on his energy bill by decreasing the temperature on his hot water tank and washing clothes in cold water. We have paid $0.00 for electricity, gas, and water in the last year. The earthship has been functioning beautifully and it has been over a year since we had to fill the propane tank which is still at over 50%. We have had plenty of electricity with no outages and have even been running the hot tub totally off the solar electric.

There are so many little things people can do to lower their domestic energy consumption. Tankless hot water heaters, power strips to turn off phantom loads, LED or compact florescent lights, and on and on and on.

Letter to Obama

Dear President Obama, I was thrilled to hear that you are proposing an education overhaul that will enable our schools to prepare our children for college or the work place and that will give them the 21st century skills needed in a 21st century world. The way that will achieve this goal effectively, efficiently, and economically, would be to require every school to have a qualified librarian. Certified librarians (those with masters in librarianship, library media endorsements on teaching degrees, etc.) are well equipped to teach students how to ask messy real world questions, find information (both in print and digitally), interpret and use that information, and create new knowledge with what they have discovered. Please make sure adequately staffed and funded libraries are in your education plan. They can make all the difference to a child or teen.

Critter Report

Summer 2009. We are seeing lizards who are almost as wide as they are long (ok, I'm exaggerating but they are really, really fat), picas are back in limited numbers, rabbits are down, bob cats are bolder. The other morning saw one sitting on top of the chicken's summer house. Saw a coyote as big as a large German shepherd. Wow!

On the domestic scene, Abby and Zoie, our fourteen year old dogs are still hanging in there. They are definitely ancient but still mobile. Zoie can't go for walks anymore so she sticks close to home. We added a new puppy in March, Chaco who is a little dynamo. Actually not so little anymore. Her mom is a Pharaoh hound and dad unknown but was apparently a huge Labrador retriever. The old puppy girls are teaching all she needs to know including to sniff for mountain lions before venturing out.

The chickens are being recalcitrant and not laying eggs right now. We are down to five as one of them was bitten by a scorpion in June. One of the chickens is evil and pecks at eggs, breaking them (when they are producing eggs, that is) and we haven't been able to identify which one it is.

Kat is still Kat. She is a great mouser so whenever one of those varmints does make it into the house she kills it and lays it out in the shower so the mess is easy to clean up. She doesn't like Chaco and still hisses at her.

Summer 2009

Haven't been updating much. Have a book due the end of this month, Teen Genreflecting, 3rd edition and working full time trying to support 38 school libraries and 3 or 4 schools that need libraries.
Life on the Edge is still wonderful, unfortunately I'm not home as much as I would like. Every year the earthship becomes more comfortable as it knits itself into the earth. We now have a "cold entry" at the west end, the main entrance which has further regulated the interior climate. It can be blazing hot outdoors, very warm in the entry area, and just perfect when we go through the door into the main part of the house. We had some scorching temps in July, up in the 90s but the 'ship never got over 78 degrees Fahrenheit. We haven't even turned on the ceiling fans this summer.