A friend of mine was/is building a recycled house. He used wooden beams from a factory being torn down. The structure is either a hexagon or a decagon shape, I can't remember exactly. It has a center concrete column, this is where the interesting part is. There is a heavy wood stove at the bottom inside the concrete column, with exhaust ducts looping through the inside of the column. The column was filled with a couple tons of sand. His plan was to be able to fire the stove at a high heat once or twice per day, and get all the energy necessary to heat the concrete column and it's several tons of thermal mass up to a decent temperature. I've been at college so I don't know how well it has worked this winter. I'll get back to you on that. Oh, the outside walls were built using cord wood and papercrete. The roof is about 18 inches thick, consisting [top to bottom] wood [recycled], foam insulation?, hot-rolled roofing, plastic sheeting, gravel, soil, grass. I helped put the soil on the roof - a power-lifting ladder and 5 gallon buckets, the rest of the work being manual labor [I'm tall, my back hurt bad the next day!].
From a distance the building looks very nice. It appears to be of stone construction. He chose "the least arable land I could buy". All-in-all quite an interesting house. It's not connected to the electrical grid either. Solar, wind power only. -- --- Martin Klingensmith http://nnytech.net/ http://infoarchive.net/ ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Make Money Online Auctions! Make $500.00 or We Will Give You Thirty Dollars for Trying! http://us.click.yahoo.com/yMx78A/fNtFAA/46VHAA/FGYolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://archive.nnytech.net/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
