We hope you enjoyed this hyperadobe earthbag guide! If you need additional help check out these resources: WORKSHOPS: tinyshinyhome.com/meetup HYPERADOBE BAGS: tinyshinyhome.com/hyperadobebag COACHING: tinyshinyhome.com/coaching
Pretty sure pine and nails are natural building sources. They do come from the earth. Actually alot of building materials that are used to build a normal home are. Definitely more than not.
Looked like you guys intentionally put a small amount of pebbles between layers? Is this integral to the design? Thanks for the time and effort on the vid
Ashley likes to do this to give the layers a little more "bite" into the next bag. Jonathan doesn't like to do this because especially when high up on the wall, having stuff you might loose your footing on is dangerous. Can't hurt, but probably not necessary :)
I’m a 68 year old retired general contractor/building inspector/plans examiner/Chief Building Official & Director of Building and Safety, who wished I could have worked another decade or two, so that I could have worked on getting cities and counties to become more accepting of alternative construction methods and materials. I would love to build just one more house for myself, but I don’t know if I have the stamina or strength to do it. I would have loved trying this building method if only I were five or ten years younger.
get involved with groups that are trying for approval or who teach the skills. Your knowledge and experience would be valuable . Dont have to move the barrows yourself if you have a horde of info and skill hungry youngsters to do it for you
@@yomamajo Thanks for your reply and the replies from others. I’m not in a position right now to build a new home, but I’m interested in finding a group of like minded people who want to build a small community together that I can join and contribute my knowledge and experience in building to the group effort.
In a couple of thousand years , someone will uncover your home, and tell stories about how you were hunter gatherers, and that this building was for religious purposes.
My grandfather was born in 1901 and built an adobe home for his family, by hand, brick by brick. The plaster over the walls eventually started to fall apart around the 2000's. But today, the house is still standing. The walls are still in tact. Great video.
I'm just a city boy, but I'm glad to know that there are still very smart people out there focused on this type of construction. Because I see a lot of unsustainable stuff happening around me usually.
I spent the weekend making a extension on my driveway with compacted chat and did all the tamping by hand. It gave me soooooo much more respect for everything you're doing and how hard you all work!
Yeah no. This is perfect for southwest united states and other deserts. Not cold climes at all. Doesn't mean they aren't warm. Bc it gets cold in the desert too. Just not that bitter cold for such long stretches.
This is the classic video for anyone wishing to use this building method. Great information in an easily understandable format. I hope it gets millions of views for you!
I've seen a variant of this where they use a hopper mounted on a tractor arm. The mix falls from the hopper into the bag like the double bucket and the tractor lays the bag down like a 3D printer. It goes really fast.
Thank you for the very complete description and comparisons. The buildings you have already completed are very cool! Hopefully your progress beats out the bad weather... Love the place you have built from the ground up.
Thank you so much. I’ve been following you from Australia. I am building a dome home for myself and my son is building a small house for himself. Your video today help tremendously. I was wondering why you weren’t putting the barbed wire in, now I now. I think the hyperadobe will be much better for my son’s build, cheaper and easier. I shared your video to him so he could also take advantage of your extensive knowledge. Wonderful video, thank you for your help. It will make our build a lot better!!
Now THIS is a awesome cheap home invention that I can get behind. I was REALLY ticked off by the idea of 3D printed mud huts, not gonna lie. I just felt like it was quite the waste of technology to recreate something our ancestors could create by hand; such backwards thinking. Felt like it was just gatekeeping SOMETHING PEOPLE CAN DO NATURALLY. To be honest though, I'm getting kinda sick of how land ownership works; corporations should not own single family homes, and society shouldn't be able to tell the homeless they can't build their own homes.
I have learned so much from ya'll. I've been following you since you started the chicken garden. Along the way ya'll have shared the ups and downs, the do's and the don't.
I'm sure someday that land will bloom and be green. I would love the quiet and the sunsets, listening to the Cayotes howling at night with the full moon above.
A permaculture fruit forest would be awesome to have on the property, veggie patches as well, don’t even need to use the current soil put in raised garden beds and bring soil in with you.
Oh my God… This is the definitive resource for hyperadobe building. I wish I had all this information before I started my Round hyperadobe building. In the end I did okay… Used a dolly to fill the bags which made life easier. Now my sister has an hyperadobe art and craft building in her back garden in the UK. Thank you so much for sharing all your hard knowledge. GENIUS.
Amazing video and so informative I really enjoy watching your videos I'm 72 and a retired general contractor I don't think I will be building anything else but truly love watching you succeed. God Bless from your Canadian Friend.
The switch to wood instead of sod was historically because of water getting in, mice, mould, bugs. It's good to see that, in dry open climate, technology has advanced to the point that it's less of a concern.
Awesome Sauce! Thank you! I just ordered the 12" bags for my outdoor shower build! I can't wait! I will rewatch the shower build for my design, and yes Ashley it is going to be circular in design, not the square I was thinking before we spoke about it at the Building conference in Rodeo, NM.
@@missmartamc I believe it was the first annual conference. It was on May 18th. It was great! There was a whole day of speakers talking about their accomplishments, failures, and expectations. I have a strawbale house on 35 acres, so it was good to see other types of building with sustainable and renewable resources. You might be able to google the conference or look up the website. I don't have the info but it should be pretty easy to find on google. thanks have a good one!
My Ancestors were building somewhat the same thing years ago when they crossed the prairie in schooners. They settled in the West in Custer County Nebraska in the1800s and had only sod to stack for homes. I have a picture that was taken by Solomon Butcher who traveled to all the homesteads In Custer County and had them stand out in front of their Soddy and he would take their picture. Not quite as modern but they did the trick for a while. I remember my grandma talking about living in one as a child. The Indians would look in the windows and her mother would give them bread. Some were built better than others.
There is a sod house museum in northern Oklahoma near where I grew up. They built a metal building over a sod house to preserve it and you can go there, see the house and even go inside. It’s very cool. It’s difficult to imagine a sod house if you have never actually seen one.
I'm from Nebraska too.❤ There are stories of cattle grazing on the roof of some of the sod houses and occasionally a foot would pop through. 😁 (But these type of sod houses were usually the type where they dug into the side of a hill and then the front made of sod.
Just make the house out of earthblocks made or delivered onsite. Much less labor intensive. It is just Legos. You just need to make sure to do the plumbing FIRST.
Have you considered trying a small lawn roller for tamping? Walking along the walls pushing a roller seems like it would have less impact on your back and shoulders and I'm curious if it would work.
There are mechanical tampers, compacting machinery that might help with that, but you would need ramps, and some muscle to “drive” it carefully so it didn’t fall off the sides.
Yay, another Longnecker family video to watch! I like how you are talking about why to build with earthen walls. It's always good to explain the pluses and minuses of building methods. I really like how you talk about the thermal mass transfer of heat and the earthquake and fire resistance of the structures. Good to know. I love how you explain how to fill your hyperadobe bags with each method. You gave really good advice about avoiding cavities in the bags and tamping the layers properly. I like how the hyperadobe bags don't have to do "the vortex" like you have to do with the stiffer and slipperier superadobe bags. It's great that you don't have to use the barbed wire between the layers or courses. The curved wall versus straight wall construction seems pretty needed in the superadobe walls and you can build domes with it. The buttresses can be a problem for long straight walls or door openings too! I loved how you address the problems with flooding and rodents for the foundation even like raising the whole building above the flood plain. Trenching and using gravel below the foundation for better drainage under the foundation is like drain tiling for regular building. Putting a vapor barrier like you did on the foundation wall facing a flood plain is a good feature too. Great discussion of openings through the hyperadobe walls needing the lintels over the openings or an arch form are really good details to know about. Locking the opening frames in with the cleats every few courses is a definite must to keep doors and windows stable in the building. I know you didn't have to say anything about below the foundation but planning the plumbing under the foundation is important too. I'm glad you mentioned the hurricane straps to put in the walls several courses below the roof you install to hold it on in high winds. I love the bottle bricks you put at the top of the hyperadobe walls to fill in below the pitched roof and the top of the hyperadobe walls. Filling the window spaces in with bottle bricks is a beautiful accent to the buildings also. The roof also held down with the Simpson hurricane ties is good to know too for the rafters to the roof support boards, often LVLs. I have been so impressed by your quest to find the right plaster for the outside of your buildings. The earthen plaster inside the building is fantastic too. I love how you did the linseed oil floor on the solar power shed. The Shou Sugi Ban treatment to preserve the wood exposed on the buildings has been great to learn about too! It has been wonderful to watch you build your homestead in the desert Longnecker family! Thanks for showing us how to do this. You guys rock!
Wow great job! This is a clear, concise presentation and I am feeling re-inspired to build this way. I built the first urban Cob structure in the US in Eugene, OR. in 1996, It is featured in the color pics section of The Hand Sculpted House. I live back home on the youngest island of Hawaii nowadays, where there is not much clay in the ground, and have considered earthbags as a way to build earth walls as an alternative to Cob. The book Earthbag Building mentions on page 16 that there are alternative options to using soils or aggregates with little to no clay content.
Tiny Shiny Home inspired us to build our own motorhome and hit the road 5 years ago. Now here we are getting super inspired to build a stationary home with hyperadobe! Much respect to you all thank you for sharing your wisdom and stoke!!
You guys are amazing! LOVE these little houses...and the shape of the round house is very asthetically pleasing as well as healthy energetically...LOVE your videos!
I am so impressed with the knowledge you have gained and your ability to share it cohesively. In addition, you two just feel like wonderful old friends, people one would want to spend time with. You are beautiful, sun kissed and radiant, and are exhibiting the joy that can come with hard work, something our world seems to have lost in these new days of technology, relegating the phrase "hard work" onto the list of dirty words. Thank you for reminding the world thru your blood, sweat, and tears. And of course, thru your beautiful smiles. Many blessings in all that you put your hands to, Marta
Excellent! We have a twelve acre hilltop property with sixty mile views in just about every direction north of Prescott. We are kicking around ideas about how to develop it. 3-4 hyperbag hacienda tiny homes would be amazing!
Where am from🇺🇬🇺🇬 in the villages, We use 2 rows of tree stems since wood is in plenty.... Then we get some smaller sticks or bamboos and we first divide their stems with a panga 3. Them we nail them on the sides of the 2 rows that we stamped firmly into the earth to make a square or circular foundation. 4. Them we just fill the four sides or circle with wet mixed dirt till to the top tall like a normal room them we roof it 5. Roof the root under and you have a free all natural room . Then u can apply all the outter cement coating 🎉🎉🎉
I built a geodesic dome in CA with my future husband when we were in our 20s. I had a blast watching this video. It looks FUN but it is hard work. You are building something remarkable, sensible and beautiful! Bravo.
I love your informational videos! I also loved the way you pronounced tomato when saying Hayden likes the tomato cans. 😂 Have a great Sunday and I love you guys! 😊❤
Brilliant, "hyper-informative" and extremely well-done video! You two are great teachers! Many thanks! I'm considering this type of build for a remote homestead in the mountains of the northwest US.
Hats off to ya'll for creating such a wonderful home! Love the dedication ya'll put into the projects and the ideas you use to make it work! Thanks for sharing. best of luck in all your endeavors! God bless! 😁🙏🙏👍👍
THANK YOU Jonathon & Ashley for sharing your experiences in such detail, you have me excited about other possibilities to build in adobe again! Your ideas are definitely quicker, easier and more cost effective than our Mud Brick home we built over 3 decades ago!!! Adobe = Rammed Earth walls or Mud Bricks , made from compositions of soil / clay mixed with hay /twigs/fibres meshed with water and contained until the supports can be removed and allowed to dry completely before you make a render to seal - these have been made world wide for thousands of years and originally animal faeces were mixed into a flurry with water and soil to seal the walls and make them watertight. Nowadays people use various sealants such as Bondcrete which we used 12 to 20 layers of back then, to form an outer skin on the walls internal & external. Using barbed wire, twine, and fine bamboo to lay between to knit the rows/layers together with various commercial such as concrete and natural products like soil/water combined to act as bricklaying mortar have been used in more recent times. OUR STORY - MUD BRICKS in the High Country in Bright a Tourist town in country Victoria Australia. Decades ago in Bright Nth Eastern , we built a mud brick house 260 sq m after purchasing a book "Build Your House Of Earth" by GF Middleton which gave a huge variety of methodologies, in order to design our house. We made our bricks 10" thick x 5"deep x 15"Long (they weighed 40lb each)and we created the house structure as Post and Beam the posts being 1.6m apart to allow electrical wiring, power points and fixing options for attaching cupboards etc.. External Temperatures in Summer up to 40 Degrees centigrade and below zero overnight in winter when it snowed - however with the 10” thick walls our temperatures remained between 18-23” all year round , magical! We had designed and previously built other homes prior to this, and since, however since building that Mud brick we have wanted to build another, because the peace/security and internal temperatures were amazing and we have always missed that house. We had a contractor come in with a tractor to process our Red Soil, then soak it all, cover with tarpaulins overnight, soak it again, cover over and leave again, and keep checking daily for moisture content with tool, this occurred over several weeks, then it was thoroughly mixed again with tractor & compactor, then funnelled into mud brick metal molds made to size, with just enough moisture content to hold it’s shape to be stacked with air space in between each one to thoroughly dry - this took around 2 months, which gave us time to pour concrete foundations Post & Beam Construction and roof on complete with a 6ft verandah & path all the way around, so then all we had to do was lay the bricks in between the posts to form the internal & external walls. This was built on acreage 180ft up from the Road on a 2 acre plateau we had a bulldozer cut out for our Home, Parking, yard, and levels below for gardens and vegies etc… however the Kangaroos, Bunnies and Wombats decimated the vegies, but we were grateful that the Wombats didn’t tunnel into our house!! Or the ledges, or decide to reside in the massive concrete water drains placed on angles down our long steep driveway up to the house. We had State Forest behind us, hence the abundant wildlife, and the Ovens river below on the opposite side of the road , so our driveway became an easy thoroughfare for the wildlife to get ice cold water to drink!!
Wow guys……..I’ve watched you all along in your process, but this was so informative and cool to watch. You’ve started a wonderful community of interested people who appreciate alternate ways of building/living. Great video! So proud of your progress, looking forward to learning more as you continue. 🙏🏽😎
We cover all that in more in the "why is natural building important" video we mentioned (ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-M2YqFTDHAm0.html). This is only about earthbag building.
I just had a hole dug for our home. We live in the Boston Mt range in Arkansas. I plan to build a hyperadobe home. The back wall will be 6 ft underground. Which is where our pantry will go. There will be a French drain. Possibly 6 mil plastic as well. The front is south facing for solar and thermal heating in winter. A reciprocal roof for collecting rain water because we don't have access to water. It hasn't been ran on our mountain. I'm ok without it. Have you ever seen an underground hyper Adobe? I have been looking for more resources. The forums and websites I looked at seemed to have fizzled out. Do you have any suggestions for active ones?
Wow! What a fantastic and thoroughly thought out video... thank you for sharing this. I've been interested in the earthship concept, but I don't like the idea of using tires... This may be the natural alternative I've been looking for. It would be great to see the efficiency of these hyperadobe homes and what it costs to live in them over time. Did y'all attend a training to learn this or did you learn by doing?
Thank you for supplying this knowledge. I hope that society will come to value our amazing planet and work to live within and sustain our natural world. Be blessed
Thank you so much for doing all the work to put this video together---to say nothing of all the work you've done to have the video to put together. Well done!
16:38 the math does not make sense. firstly, 24' x 24 = 576' not 567' but that's minor. what I'm really confused about is where 1,640 comes from. because that should be the final amount of linear feet needed, then you should be dividing it by the length of the roll (which in this formula should be 567') to get 2.8 rolls. I really wonder if in fact they meant to divide 576' by 1640' to get 0.35 roll (especially considering how small of a structure they used in the example: 3' x 9' by 12' high). in fact I checked the Volm website and their HDPE tubular mesh comes in 500 meter rolls, i.e. 1640'. so they just did the math wrong. don't make their mistake or you'll be buying a lot more rolls than you need for your project. the formula is [total linear feet] / 1640 = # of rolls needed
Thank you. You two really gave great information. Although I would love doing this 30 years ago when I had more time than money, I still love dreaming … and watching you is my next best way. Thanks again!!
if you had a conveyer belt like a roofers later vayer to help with moving dirt on top of walls. thought I'd share an idea while watching. thank you for sharing. good stuff
Fantastic, informative video! I first saw your work through your friendship with the MLH channel! I apprecaite your hard work and great ideas! I wanted to ask if you know of suppliers for the hyper adobe bags in Australia, please?
Such a cool thing that you're doing! Beautiful structures, honest presentation of the workload and considerations too - It was very well thought out. Thanks.
Marvelous! I’ve been a huge fan of Earthships for a long time now. Replacing the tires with this option is a great option. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and experience of this technique.
