Taos Revisited

I'm going to be starting my travel to Taos New Mexico, back from California in a few days, and thought it would make sense to cover more of my experiences and techniques learned while I was in Taos. I'll also talk some more about what exactly makes an Earthship.

Materials Used

The materials that are used in Eathships generally are Eco friendly. Meaning that they have either already been used and are no considered waste (car tyres, glass/ plastic bottles), or have been reclaimed (e.g masonry cut offs used to mosaic a floor space). For example the wall in the picture to the right is used solely from car tyres (rammed with earth), used glass bottles, and adobe (mixed sand, earth and water).

An Earthship generally uses between 800 and 1400 car tyres, depending on the size, thousands of bottles (for the outside boundary wall, and the dividing walls in the earthship), tons and tons of earth, (for the berm, and the tyres), 12-24 vega's (stripped trees 1' in diameter), 6-12 pallets of cement (for the load bearing walls, and finishes).

Cistern access point

 Water collection

 A earthship is self supporting. there are no wires of pipes coming into the building from a conventional grid, so collecting your own water to survive is essential. The roof structure is designed to capture the water, by feeding it run off into a filter, that then guides the water into a huge tank (or cistern), this water is then used for all your daily needs. The water is fed through one of two filter systems depending of whether of not it needs to be potable (drinkable).