I came across Earthships on the internet and was immediately fascinated. Not only did these homes seem totally energy efficient, they were also constructed from recycled materials. From my research I found out there was one in Scotland in the UK, and one in Brighton. Fortunately I was to visit Brighton and resolved to seek the building out.
Here is the video about the Earthship I saw:
Recently modern homes are having energy efficiency built into them from the outset – even to the extent of requiring little or no heating at all. Earthships came into being as ‘off the grid’ homes in remote places, with little or no need of public utilities. Experiments with these and other sustainable forms of building are teaching us a lot about making energy efficient homes.
Brighton Earthship
The one in Brighton shown in this photograph was the first Earthship to be made in the UK. It was built as a Community Centre for Stanmer Organics on a Soil Association accredited site near Brighton. It took me a while to find as we parked a car (sorry) off site and walked into the 17 acre site of Stanmer Park. There was a lot of gardening going on all over the site and it was a treat to see some cooperative economy at work. The site has a not-for-profit consortium with 12 or so groups of expanding membership.
Earthships have been quietly developing for 30 years from communities in Taos, New Mexico and most notably the pioneering work of Michael Reynolds. They have come a long way from handling just the ‘hot and dry’ of Mexico and can now cope with even Scottish weather. Water is carefully collected and used water is just as carefully filtered back into the environment.
The buildings are made to harvest the natural resources around them – sun, rain, wind – and recycle as much as possible. Even the plants around them benefit from carefully filtered and treated ‘waste’ water. Due to their construction, aspect and insulation they maintain a constant temperature with little fluctuation. The buildings maximise the use of sunlight for heating and lighting. The windows are specially angled to maximise sunlight in the winter and reflect it in the summer.
All sorts of ‘rubbish’ goes into building them but it doesn’t show. The walls of this Earthship are made from soil impacted into 1000 rubber tyres, 2 tons of old bottles and cans and 90 reclaimed granite blocks (with some cement also). Wherever possible the building uses renewable, local and recycled, natural and waste materials in construction.
The buildings consume no fossil fuels and generate their own power for electricity and water heating as you can see by the solar panel array in the image. They store heat by using the ground, similarly to the sun warming up a rock. This is still a far more efficient way of storing heat than any type of battery we can yet make! This is why the Brighton Earthship has as many as 40 batteries to store the solar and wind power it harvests for occasional heat, pumps and lights.
