Category: Sustainable Living

5 Incredible Natural Buildings at a Radical Ecovillage

This is a tour of 5 of my favorite natural buildings at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. DR has nearly 40 natural buildings, making it one of the largest collections of natural buildings in one place in all of north America. There’s strawbale buildings, cob, earthen and lime plaster, earthen floors, timberframing, cordwood masonry, rocket mass heaters, wattle and daub, and light clay straw. And some of these are pretty swanky houses.

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Ziggy’s Blog: www.theyearofmud.com

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Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage: www.dancingrabbit.org

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Amazing Timberframe Strawbale House with Castle-like Interior

This amazing strawbale house located at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage is one of my favorites in the village. There is so much to it and the design is so unique. It features beautiful timberframe with strawbale for wall structure and insulation. Lime plaster exterior and earthen interior makes for a pleasant aesthetic and some natural organic shapes. The earthen plaster interior and framing have been designed in places to create an almost castle-like look in some of the rooms. The earthen plaster interior walls are inlaid in places with glass shard mosaics.

But not only does the house have a unique beauty, it has many sustainable systems for providing for basic needs like running hot water from a cook stove or evacuated solar tubes, radiant floor heating, rainwater catchment, wood and passive solar heating.

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What Happened to This Lime Plaster Job? And How I Fixed It

How do you fix lime plaster gone wrong? Early in the building of Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, when strawbale building was a budding technology, people tried some experimental stuff. Well, to be honest, people are often experimenting because not everyone that builds their first house has all the knowledge they need to do it right the first time. We all make mistakes, and the combining of earthen and lime plasters on strawbale exterior walls was one of those experiments that failed. In this video I show you what happens when you put lime plaster on top of earthen, and how it can be repaired to make a long lasting wall surface.

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I Fixed a Dead Chest Freezer and Turned It Into a Chest Fridge

My old superefficient Sundanzer freezer was DOA when I got back to Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage from Florida last spring. This time, I wanted to convert a chest freezer to a fridge with an external thermostat. That way it would be more efficient because it wouldn’t dump the cold every time I opened the door. But when I looked into chest freezers, they were not available and were on backorder for months into the future.

But I noticed a number of appliances on the curb in the village waiting to be brought in for recycling, one of which was a small freezer that still looked in good shape. I thought I’d do some troubleshooting and see if I could get it running again.

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What Happens When You Use Frozen Lime Putty in Lime Plaster?

This fall I started a little home improvement project on the Timberframe building at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. The house had originally been plastered with earthen plaster on strawbale and lime plaster on top of the earthen plaster. This didn’t work so well and over the years the lime plaster has been cracking and peeling off the undercoat. I’d planned to buy all new lime for the project but then I found a barrel full of old slaked lime putty. This had been left out for many years and experience freezing and thawing many times.

I wondered, can you still use frozen lime putty? People around Dancing Rabbit had always spread the rumor that frozen lime putty was no good because it’s chemical structure had changed through the freezing. But I looked it up online and found that that isn’t true. So I decided to make use of that lime putty and redo part of the wall with it. How did it turn out? Watch the video.

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Ramen Noodles For the End Times: Homemade Ramen Noodles in a Solar Cooker

So society is crumbling, there’s limited access to fossil fuel, there’s chaos in the streets, but you happen to have some flour and baking soda and a solar cooker. You can easily make homemade ramen noodles without any fossil fuel.

I used to think of ramen noodles as a low quality convenience food. Still I depended on them back in college and I still love a doctored up packet of fancy ramen noodles from the asian grocery from time to time. But ramen noodles are very popular in Japan, and as with many Japanese things, they have taken it to a level of artisan perfection. You can pretty easily make your own ramen noodles. In this video, I show you how I make ramen noodles without any fossil fuel inputs, using only the power of the sun.

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