Jake vs the Earthship Final

The mass wall of the earthship did not survive the Tennessee winter mud season. I covered it as best as I could but there was just no way to keep all the water out. Where the water got into the wall, it slumped and began leaning forward into the building and became unusable as a building component. I believe if I would have amended the soil with sand and lime and installed it into the bags with a more consistent moisture content, it would have worked out better. I've also discovered that I did in fact order non UV treated bags. I had no choice but to take it down as it was making me nervous just to stand near it.

The failure of this building was a large time sink and direction change for the  project as a whole. I've been hesitant to release the video partly because I wanted to have a more clear direction of what I was going to do moving forward and also this video was made during a stressful time of uncertainty and does not reflect my usual optimism.

Unfortunately, I do not have the resources (time,money) to put into another experimental building. Since the making of this video, I have pushed the mass wall into the ditch to form a dam wall with a fairly large body of water. I re-graded the site and have concrete forms up for a pre-fab steel shell building which will be well insulated and have radiant floors fed by solar water heating panels and will still incorporate the cooltubes and a solar chimney effect with clerestory vent windows. I may revisit being off grid with electric power at some point in the future.