Our First Can Wall

This job was really fun and pretty easy too.  Before we can get the framing up, we need to get the bond beam across the front face.  There is a large gap in the tire work of the front wall. I don't know for sure but I believe it is there to accomodate the drain sleeve for the toilet, and to give just a couple extra inches to the width of the hallway to make room for the bathroom and the washer/dryer.  All we did was mix sand and portland cement

and plop it down, and stick cans in it.  We crimped the cans a little so that they wouldn't pull out of the cement and tried to keep each course of cans level.  We found that we could get about 5 courses done, and then we needed to let them cure for about 30 minutes before we could do more, otherwise the weight would squish the cans out.  The blue board is insulation. Because this wall is an exterior wall we put double insulation between two can walls (there is another can wall on the otherside).  The mouths of the cans all face outwards to act as a metal lath that plaster can hang onto later.  The whole wall took us about a

day and a half.  We used about 1400 cans and a bunch of cement, which brings up several environmental issues.  First, bauxite, which is aluminum ore, is stip mined in the rainforests of South America.  Is using alluminum in this way the best use of this resource? Probably not.  There is a ton of embodied energy in alluminum, as well.  It takes almost as much energy to recycle them.  So the only true answer is to not use aluminum cans to begin with. Good luck.  The only reason that there are cans in this wall

anyway, is to put space between the concrete.  It makes the wall into a matrix, which allows the wall to be stronger with less weight.  They also take up space so that the wall requires less concrete, the environmental evils of which I've already spoken about.  The whole idea here is a cheap, strong, easy to build wall. The best thing about this type of wall is that it can be any shape that you want and later we'll build our planter walls with the same idea. I've got an idea to use something different than cans, though. It was nice to have a quick project and to be successful at it. We'll see what the inspectors think.

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