Construction

Progress on the MicroHouse

MicroHouse Construction Manager Chris Reinhart is moving forward on the OSE Microhouse design. The Microhouse is a modular, low-cost, simple-but-comfortable, Compressed Earth Brick (CEB) house design. It is designed such that the different parts of the...

Factor e Farm Update: June to July

Hello everyone, sorry for the delay between blog posts lately. I’m Parker Bonnell, one of OSE’s newer staff members, working primarily with Marcin and Aaron on organizational development. The last month has been a busy one at the Factor E Farm. Our...

Construction Update – November 2, 2011

Workshop Addition

We have just built a 750 square foot workshop addition: Workshop Addition from Open Source Ecology on Vimeo. Rosa from Los Angeles is an early adopter who invested in our Tractor-Soil Pulverizer-Compressed Eearth Brick (CEB) Press package – to start...

Cohabitat Gathering 2011 Report

Here is a report from the Cohabitat Gathering 2011, the first international natural building conference in Poland: Cohabitat Gathering 2011 from dobraidea on Vimeo. Here are some interviews, including Pawel Sroczynski, the lead organizer of the Cohabitat...

Modular CEB Construction: Prototype Structure Results for 2010

Here’s an update on our progress in modular CEB construction. In a previous post we’ve seen the beginning of CEB columns and foundations. These are part of an experimental modular CEB construction method. Final Construction 2010 from Marcin...

Construction Time

We have finally started construction after spending most of the year developing equipment. We finished the CEB press on Tuesday. The open source Tractor, CEB press, Power Cube, and Soil Pulverizer are now in action. The main obstacle of soil handling...

Modular CEB Construction

Meet Scott – who is now here on his Dedicated Project Visit, focusing on preparation for CEB construction. We are evolving a Modular Building System based on CEBs, the next fork after our initial directions. — Hey everyone, I been here just...

13 Bricks Per Minute… and Counting

Today’s goal was to determine maximum pressing rates attainable with The Liberator, the open source CEB press. We obtained data to verify some of the predicted rates shown in italics in this table. To boost morale, we started by pressing thin, 2...

Solar Village 2010

William and I have been hashing out the details of construction for the coming year. Our plan is at this wiki page and further details on techniques to be used are here. We are currently planning on a CEB-straw bale hybrid – a double CEB brick wall...