This is not your ancestors’ straw hut! Straw bale homes are the new wave in green home building. Why not? Straw is natural, highly renewable, energy efficient, mold & allergy resistant, fire retardant (bet you didn’t know that) and one of the healthiest choices you can make for the frame of your green home. The range of designs and architectural features is unlimited. Check out the Santa Barbara dream home host Kevin Contreras built out of straw – it’s Zen modern and green to the core.
1:00 – nice!
Yerks, once the plaster is on, it provides more of the rigidity and there won’t be any movement, as long as the foundation is sound (as in any construction). Pre-compressing the bales is sufficient. Another alternative is post and beam construction using the bales as infill insulation and a bonding point for the wall plaster. It’s a tradeoff that uses more wood, but satisfies some hard to please building inspectors.
Good Video overall, But did you say Straw Bale Construction has “been used for Thousands of years”? Bailing machines were invented in the 1800’s making “Thousands of years” an overstatement. Cobb and adobe using straw however has been used for thousands of years.
How rigid is it? I would think that as a soft material, straw would squish down, even if it was compressed into bails beforehand. What kind of settling issues would a house like that have over time?
Very intriguing!
Could you please put out more videos on these subjects? We’re studying architecture in Norway and we can’t see buildinggreentv other than on youtube…
You take that stuff into account as you are working with the house. And a lower energy output is typically more important to those building these homes than a few extra feet of space. 😉
those walls are like 2 feet thick. i hope that is part of the design and not the required thickness for using straw as Insy. otherwise your losing some major Sq. Ft’g
stfu
im building one myself, they are great, and if you use passive solar placing a lot of windows on the south end, you will have a nice warm home in the winter without paying your local utility company $300 per month. hurry and get more videos up!