Energy Efficient Type of Walls

There are a great number of natural materials that can be utilized in constructing an energy efficient building. Many of them can be found at or near the building site and are oftentimes found in abundance.

Choices for energy efficient type of walls would be Adobe. Adobe has been around for a very long time. It is composed of different mixes of sand, straw and clay. The straw is what gives the mix its strength. It’s poured into blocks and dried in the sun to make a block which is then used for building. This block is then mortared into place. Some advantages of adobe include it being easy to use in many different types of energy efficient housing design, it’s an excellent choice for a passive solar design and this is a good one-it’s fireproof.

A close cousin of adobe is cob since it too is constructed from sand, clay and straw. However instead of it being poured into blocks it is affixed directly to the structure. It can be molded into all types of shapes including curves. The thickness of cob walls can range anywhere from 4 to 24 inches thick. Once constructed these walls are very hard.

A third type of natural building material is rammed earth. Like the two types mentioned before this one also contains a mix of clay and sand but unlike them it also contains Portland cement. To implement this building technique one would “ram” the mix” in between forms which are already in place. Once the earth is tamped down in the forms the walls can then be removed. These walls are usually somewhere between 12 to 18 feet thick. Benefits of this type of construction include the fact that they are conducive to passive heating and cooling, they are very strong and are therefore hurricane resistant as well as being fireproof.

Rammed earth tire walls are made by using old tires that might otherwise end up in landfills. These tires are placed on a base that’s been compacted and then filled with 300 or more lbs of dirt which is tamped down with an automatic tamping device. When you get to the second row you stagger the tires and plug the openings with cardboard to keep all the dirt from falling out. Once that part of the process is finished the tires are covered with cement stucco or mud plaster. Old tires do not contain the same nasty chemicals found in the new ones as they’ve already been released so that needn’t be a worry and the tires are also covered over with a covering providing even more protection. This material is also ideally suited to passive heating and cooling and your home can be made even more efficient by adding additional passive solar options.

Another natural option for building energy efficient type of walls is earthbag construction. The earthbag itself can be made of burlap or polypropylene. The bags are filled with moistened clay-dirt or cement-stabilized dirt which again is tamped down like the rammed earth walls. When this mixture is dry it forms a “block” which is rock hard. The bags are stacked close together, tamped down, and leveled. The exterior of the bags are covered with lime-mud plaster or mud to form the outermost covering of the wall.

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