What the.....?!

Since the first work party was so successful, we decided to have another one.  As we approached the site on Saturday morning, something was amiss: our cisterns were GONE! Our engineer insisted that we put cistern tanks in instead of the "swimming pool" type cisterns that are draw in our plans. So we bought two 4300 gallon plastic potable water cisterns.  They cost about $3000 each.  They're about 8.5'X10' and weigh 900 pounds. Now they were missing! As we got closer, we saw one rolled up against a telephone pole on the edge of our property, restrained -barely- by an old section of barbed wire fence.

At first we couldn't see the other one.  Someone must have come and messed with them. Once we stopped and looked, we found the other one.  A quarter mile away in a field!  Now why would someone bother rolling that tank all the way over there! That's BORED.  Later a neighbor stopped by.  He said, "We get some strong winds out here." Our tanks had blown away!  The one had blown across our lot, across the street, over a fence, through a field and stopped in a dry streambed.  It took us an hour to roll the tanks back onto our property.

The rest of the Earthship...

We are making progress slowly.  Working only on the weekends isn't very fast. What we've found is that if you stuff the tires as much as possible by hand, they pound very quickly.  Whenever people show up to help, that's usually the job we give them: stuff dirt in tires.  It REALLY speeds things up.  Not to mention that most of our visitors aren't too excited to swing a sledge hammer all day!

We could have planned this one better...  The cisterns need to sit lower than the lowest part of the finished roof, which will be about 9.5 feet.  The tanks are 10' tall.  Oops. To fix this, we decided to dig down another foot inside the cistern houses.  This would have been a lot easier if we hadn't already done four layers of tires!  Furthermore, being early February, our clay soil was really hard.  We rented an electric jackhammer to break up the dirt and then shoveled it out by hand. Once the tanks are in and plumbed, we can continue the tire walls around the cisterns.  Then we will fill the space between the tires

and the tanks with sandy soil. We've started (and are pretty close to finishing)

the front wall.  This wall will only be four tires high and they are all in a straight row.  After working up high on "U" shaped walls, these tires are going very quickly. We've set a deadline to be done with the tires.  If we aren't done by the end of March, we will hire a crew to finish them and get on to a different part of the building.

Drop us a line... earthpower1@yahoo.com

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