I own 10 acres, and live on it, in a "normal" 3bd2ba 1400 sqft house.
time and labor intensive. I work in maintenance and construction.
I have about 3000 cuft of clay/dirt to work with. Aiming for about 400, to *maybe* 500 sqft.
I plan to use about 40% straw, 50% clay/mud and 10% Portland cement. form bricks, sun bake and build from those, like cider block houses. it is more common to just form the house out of cob slump, not bricks. why not bricks? am I missing something? with bricks, I can form holes in them to reduce the amount of cob.
will frame the window rough openings with treated wood, install modern vinyl windows.
foundation: I would like to use my cob blend (more cement %) but may be forced to do real concrete.
Roof will be joist & rafter, overly will probably be synthetic underlayment and architectural laminate. it is what I'm most familiar with and I assume cheaper.
I will bury a two barrel septic system using blue poly barrels and PVC w/ grey water divert valve option.
Water supply will be pex from cistern supply and pump. I don't want to connect it to my homestead water well. I don't mind occasionally connecting via hose, or filling from homestead, but I don't want it fully connected.
standing shower and toilet flange will be plumbed and poured at foundation, along with foam sleeved pex supply lines.
electrical will be independent of the homestead. I have a spare 110v / 48v solar charge controller. will probably buy new LiFePO4 for the house, and move our 300Ah FLA to the cottage. panels are easy to source.
ok... talk to me. what am I missing?
Bricks need a kiln or a lot of sun. Cob you just cut and stack. Consider wattle and and daube besides cobb.
Mud bricks baked in the sun are common where conditions permit. Smear some more clay or stucco on them when you're done to make it look nice.
Derp.
If you somehow didn't see innyour research, you have invented Adobe bricks, a very common building stylem
>cob this
>daub that
Return to Sod.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sod_house
friends
>foundation: I would like to use my cob blend
No, just no, never do that unless you're living in the desert and your soil never gets moist. Cob will suck up the moisture and wick it up into your walls. Cob needs a good foundation of stone, fired brick or cement and a good roof with plenty of overhang.
You dont need cement in your bricks. They will be plenty strong without and afaik mixing the two doesnt really improve it. Never tried it myself though. make test bricks with varying % and test them. You probably want to add some sharp sand too. Reduces shrinkage when drying.
Its more common to just build straight with cob,because its less work that way. You mix your cob and form your wall from it right away. With bricks, you make your mix, slap it into the form, let it dry, move the bricks to the construction site, mix mortar and stack them up. The advantage is that they dont shrink any more after you build the wall and you wont get any cracks. I'm not sure how you would make them hollow and I would probably not trust hollow cob bricks for load bearing walls.
Its nice to finish the walls with a fine clay plaster on the inside and a lime plaster on the outside. You can add pigments and polish up the clay plaster with wax/oil for a very smooth and shiny finish.
Heed taken. will be pouring a standard high strength concrete foundation.
good suggestion on the tote septic. I can get them cheap. also better because they come equipped with a 8" threaded port lid on top.
it is a mediocre Chy-na clone of a Victron. MPPT, 60A 250v input. it functions, but has some issues: it makes clocks run slow, meaning it is not 60htz, but it claims to be. it does not charge at a high enough voltage for long-term FLA health. I think it maxed out at 54v or 55v. I may be wrong on the numbers, but after much troubleshooting I discovered it was not fully charging my bank. since this was installed a a whole home off-grid, I needed good shit. the vendor just let me keep it rather than pay to ship it back when they refunded my money. this is all from aboot 5 or 6 years ago, so memory is fading.
all that to say, it's good enough for second-hand use at an occasionally used hobby rental cottage.
we now use a top-tier brand name system. still DIY Installed, but some of the best equip you could get at the time of purchase.
finally: I *may* be shifting towards "regular" cob as opposed to bricks. as yall stated, it's just less work.
>it is a mediocre Chy-na clone of a Victron
Is it a fangpusun? I've read that these are actually made in the same factory that was making Victron units using the same parts. Apparently this is a problem that you run into as an OEM when you hire someone else to manufacture your equipment.
You say charge controller, but then you reference clocks running slow, 60hz etc. So I assume that this is some kind of all-in-one charge controller/inverter?
yes. it is an all-in-one controller/inverter.
for our house, we use a Sol-Ark 12k. it is also all-in-one but it is a quality machine. we ran on it for 3 years at the old hoose. our system needs some PV expansion and we plan to upgrade to LiFePO4. we are still in the process of getting it re-installed, wired, connected and online at the new hoose. we should be back off-grid by May.
picrel is the ching-chong we *might* install at the cottage. for all the trouble of it, I might just buy something different. alternatively, I may use the ching-chong as an **inverter only** and buy a separate charge controller that will properly charge my bank, but make use of the inverter in ching-Chong.
still in planning. I have a LONG time to think about it before we get to electrical installation and wiring.
Throw it the frick out, and either get a small EG4 from Signature Solar or a Growatt 3K ES TL TVM from Ian at watts247.com. Look on DIYSOLARFORUM for any other actual dealers, if those don't work for you.
Never buy copy-cat shit from ebay or whatnot that 'looks like' Growatt, MPP, or Outback. That's a good way to burn your stuff down, or damage something else, like the BMS.
Schneider and DEYE (Sol-Ark) are two others, higher end. Along w victron. Victron's focus is offgrid, as you know. Mostly boat stuff, were it's beginnings.
It's not you per se, but the amount of extreme cringe on Facebook solar forums just blew my mind. I don't use facebook, never was, then decided to look for solar groups some time in the last 6 months. Oh my god, unbelievably uninformed. There's this thing, called Youtube. And there's a guy on there, Will Prowse (and many others). And they/he have forums... with actual skilled people.
So you don't waste your money on first-timer mistakes who just throw cash at it with zero information. I mean zero. The level of investigation they did before either stating something moronic or asking a question indicating less than zero effort, or spending money.. I get perfectly well why Biden was placed into office. Time to sweep the morons out; they are holding us back.
>Never buy copy-cat shit from ebay or whatnot that 'looks like' Growatt, MPP, or Outback.
Boomer FUD. Growatt and MPP are both virtual brands-- they just slap branding onto generic chinese units made by another company. Outback at one point moved some of their manufacturing to China(or India??) and the company they hired to manufacture for them also started selling clones through other channels. These clones contain genuine parts, genuine circuit boards, and run the genuine firmware from Outback.
On the spare 110v 48v charge controller, would that be a Growatt, EG4, MPP... what?
>I will bury a two barrel septic system using blue poly barrels and PVC w/ grey water divert valve option.
consider using IBC totes instead. It won't be a lot more digging, and they'll last a lot longer before filling with indigestible material.
A cob, by definition, is the gobs/wads of clayey material that you're plopping onto the walls. You're making stabilized earth bricks or adobes. There is no "why not"--- earth bricks, stabilized, reinforced, or neither have been used for thousands of years
termites eat the frick out of cob homes fyi
Planning permission?
Or hidden by trees or what?..
What country?
Cool
any south border state besides caliwali has counties where dirt huts are allowed