[Cob] Silo Stove Squat

[Clint Popetz]

Have you ever fired ceramics?  If you have any air pockets in the
clay, the air expands and the piece explodes.  Now take that to the
scale of a house, where natural clay mixed by feet is heterogenous and
has a lot of air space (especially in the straw)...

I could be way off base, but I'd expect it to just be rubble when
you're finished.

Also, the heat it takes to fire clay that thick is immense, much more
than you'd get by just building a fire in the house.  I don't think
you could get enough air/fuel into a house to fire the walls.   Even
the top of my cob oven wasn't ceramic when I demolished it to build
another, and it had a lot of fire in it.

Neat idea though :)

-Clint

On 6/8/06, davidsheen at davidsheen.com <davidsheen at davidsheen.com> wrote:
> [ accompanying images at:  http://www.davidsheen.com/silostove ]
>
> As far as I know, nothing similar to this has ever been done before, and
> that's why I'm calling upon my community of pyromancers and eco-experts to
> let me know what you think, before I build a large-scale model and leave a
> large hole in the ground of burnt earth.  But if you think it just might
> work, we may have on our hands a new mutant form of healthy housing.
>
> I've always been inspired by earth architect Nader Khalili's 20-year-old
> idea of firing clay domes and vaults from within, to create ceramic
> vessels the size of whole houses.  But although they're probably stronger
> than unfired mud houses, the firing simply isn't necessary -- regular cob
> and adobe buildings are strong enough as it is -- and to my mind, can't
> justify the use of that much fossil fuel.
>
> But after visiting the underground earth house of eco-architect Malcolm
> Wells in December and meeting the man himself; after returning from a trip
> to Ethiopia in which I beheld the enormous rock-hewn churches of Lalibela,
> monasteries carved out of stone; and after seeing how high density mud
> skyscrapers in Yemen simulate underground cool-temperature conditions...
>
> My interest in building down into the earth has been renewed.  But you
> can't build walls of earth underground; they'll just get flooded with
> groundwater and melt, collapse into a mudpit.  That's why Malcolm Wells
> pours concrete.  But what if we first fire them up, using Nader Khalili's
> method?  They'd be impervious to water on all sides, at half the
> ecological cost of concrete!
>
> If we take cobmaster Ianto Evans' rocket stove and elbow joint model, blow
> it up to the scale of a 150-round foot house, ta-da, you've got a secret
> subterranean home that's invisible to building inspectors and nosy
> neighbours.  Once the cast clay structure has cooled off and can be lived
> in, the elbow joint acts as an air cooling tower, and the chimney at
> ground level heats up in the sun and facilitates Venturi Effect
> ventilation.
>
> Instead of just digging down with a Bobcat, an earthen cylinder or dome is
> built from either cob or adobe within the pit, and a one-foot gap is left
> between the structure and the surrounding earth.  Before the pit is fired,
> small holes can be poked into the earthen walls with a sharp spear.
> Afterwards, the gap is filled with 2-Litre plastic bottles which trap air
> for excellent external insulation; they also allow light to filter through
> from up top, poking through the holes in the wall.
>
> Like the adobe homes of the original inhabitants of the Southwestern
> United States, the Silo Stove Home can be entered from the top, by
> climbing down a ladder.  If strict secrecy is desired in this
> anti-democratic day and age, the chimney can be suitably decorated from
> the outside to resemble some kinds of artistic obelisk -- no one will
> suspect that you've living underground in creature comfort!
>
> I should also point out here that a house need not be limited to one room
> -- several rooms can be built and knitted together with Khalili earthen
> arches, and fired separately to create a whole series of underground
> caverns, if you so desire.  Or, if you can't fathom the thought of living
> under the earth, why not start off with a post-Peak Oil-ready water
> catchment and containment tank that's much better than cement?
>
> If you are not previously acquainted with the work of architects Evans,
> Khalili, and Wells, I highly recommend that you pick up some of their
> books to learn more about why each of these ideas are just about as
> ecological as you can get.  And by combining the most efficient stove
> design with the strongest earthen structure, while retaining the most
> amount of topsoil for plant life, could they be even greater than the sum
> of their parts?
>
> [ accompanying images at:  http://www.davidsheen.com/silostove ]
>
>
>
>
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