3. The Tires

Llantas de mi Corazon

The core concept of building 'this earthship' is not 'insulation value'. Instead, it has to do with thermal batteries.  The point is that using passive solar gain, you import heat when the sun is at a low declination (winter) and you exclude it when the sun is at it's highest declination (verano).  You manage this to some degree by having a large roof overhang so you keep the house from overheating during the summer.  The house is aligned with the windows on a southern aspect (in the northern hemisphere).  That is to say, at 12:00 noon the full winter sun should be singing in the windows, with at least a couple of hours on each side of the dinner bell.

While many have chosen to use single tires and rammed earth, stacked layer after layer, as the sole wall material.  We chose to use only a few rammed earth tires on the south wall to better manager window sizing.  Then, for the three other walls of the ground floor we used the larger building blocks.  While in close up images this looks like a large living space, in reality it is only a couple of hundred square feet on the ground, mas or menos.

Fundamentally, you want to use material that is the worst insulator possible so that you can more easily charge the structural walls (thermal batteries) during daylight hours and easily dissipate the heat throughout cooler periods.  The deeper you can get the charge, the longer will be the release time.

Somewhere in the middle of this magical wall is an imaginary line. It is the point at which the inside temperature and the outside temperature meet... and arm wrestle.  In design school we refer to it as the Doolittle concept of Pushimepulley.  Our own Eastern philosophy (East Costilla) is wanting to call it the confluence of Yin/Yang.  Basically, it is the pragmatic and practical cosamathingy.

Here we have the Beginnings of our Earthship project, Las Primicias, las llantas.

 

That looks like snow on them thar hills.

Looking inside the Tire Bale.  Just a bunch of damn tires.

Well, there are some rammed earth tires along the South wall that support the passive solar glass.

Technical Specification Section

The rest are Tire Bales.  Up to 100-tires, 20-lbs each, make for a 2,000 pound bale.  48-bales all told.  96,000 lbs of tires.  4,800-tires recycled.  If each tire traveled 40,000 miles, average, that is a total of 192,000,000 miles.   On average, that is about 402 round-trips to the moon.

Rather than filling a landfill somewhere, We have converted these tires to "Thermal Batteries".  You can call it green all you want.  It is an idea project, an effort in imagineering, a demonstration of "we can".  We are neutral on colors - we've had to live with that all our life.  Blue skies, White snow, Black nights, Green grass.  This is a high-mileage spaceship, on Earth.