Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/31/an-earthship-meets-a-tiny-hous.html
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I have a few questions
- Do tires leach anything into the surrounding structure? Is it toxic?
1.1 Aren’t tires super flammable? - How long will the linseed oil floor last before it needs to be resurfaced.
- What was the council’s problem with flushing and watering the green house with grey water?
- What is that waterproof Moroccan plaster they casually mentioned, as though we were supposed to be familiar?
- Are the white outer walls plaster, white clay or something else?
- How much would this cost without free labor? (“If it is inaccessible to the poor , it is neither radical nor revolutionary.”)
6.1 How rich is that dude any way and where does he get his money from?
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I have not actually watched the video but linseed oil flooring is just lineoluem. It depends on what top coating they use.
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Probably, over time.
Tires made more sense back in the Whole Earth Catalog days: They were everywhere, free for the taking and weren’t being recycled.
I suspect that one of the bigger issues would be getting it past the code inspectors.
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I didn’t watch the video, but I imagine the answer to #4 is Tadelakt.
It’s super labor intensive, but perfect for a diy-er into meditative work. You basically smear the plaster with slime from olive oil soap then polish it with a smooth stone, over and over and over. The Steens down in Arizona were the first I knew to reintroduce it into the natural building scene.
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At 15:39 they say the floors are earthen, just clay from outside, with linseed oil finish, multiple coats of linseed oil that soaks in and makes it waterproof, and not dusty, feels nice to your bare feet
At 16:31 Yes, they say the tub is Tadelakt.
I didn’t watch the entire video, just skipped around, but did happen to see/hear those parts 
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How does it hold up to wildfires?
I sadly smile everytime I think of the video of the guy with an Earthship in Alberta, in winter, sitting close to a wood fire and rubbing his hands together in front of it. It’s off-grid so long as the truck keeps bringing cords of wood.
The whole object of these Earthship type structures is they build enormous thermal mass into the structure - which evens out temperature differentials. It takes longer to heat up and longer to cool down. But when you’re in Alberta and its 30 below of course you are going to have to apply heat - and you are off grid whether you are cozy or freezing. So these tire walls are rammed full of earth and each course is laid brick fashion. You then apply a thick earthen stucco internally and externally. How do they stand up in a bushfire? Well, as many of them are out in the desert there is no bush to burn - at least in the sense of a runaway fire - and you are not going to have vegetation against your home. They would stand up about as well as a mudbrick home - but if a spark managed to get into roofing timber then there would be something to burn. Baffling why people have to ask questions that a 10 second google search would reveal.
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