I learned a hard lesson last weekend and put myself into the hospital. That's not your Mother's heat out there anymore. I'm back home now and feeling great, but still taking it easy for a few days yet.
With extra time on my hands I started thinking more about that huge hole in my front yard. That white stuff on the walls is caliché, which is limestone that has been dissolved out of the surrounding mountains (like when Carlsbad Caverns was formed) and then later is left in sometimes huge deposits. On my place its depth varies from a couple of feet from the surface on one side, to quite a bit deeper farther from the mountains. The thickness and size of the deposits varies all over the place. That hole has been open for a couple of years now and the walls are mostly intact. The exception is at the bottom of the ramp, which ended up past the caliché and in deep sand. Even there I am amazed at how little has collapsed. If we had weather here besides hot and cold then I'm sure there would be washouts. Even though the "official" rainfall last year was about six inches I probably got less than two.
Of course the heat is what got me re-focused on the hole because at that depth the temperature should be really close to the annual average all the time, and here that's 68f. I'm comfortable today because I opened up my dome at dawn and shed some heat, then buttoned up when the temperature differential closed. But I used an electric fan to move the heat, and on the news they are saying that the AZ fires are about to take down the grid and us poor Tejanos are going to lose 45% of our feed. When the rolling brownouts start in a few days a lot of the stick houses with dark shingles are going to get really hot.
The hole has a concrete ring in it that is 1' thick and 2' wide, around the perimeter of the 27' hole, that was to be the footing for a monolithic type concrete shell. That plan was abandoned two years ago. Now that ring will make a great footing for tire walls similar to earthship construction. Experimenting a few years ago I found that you can cut the sidewall of a tire into a flap that you then turn into the next tire before you fill it. That locks the tires together very well. For fill I am going to use what came out of the hole. I don't have to lift it to put it into tires, I just have to shove it over the side of the hole into a waiting row of interlocked tires. I have said for years that I am not at all interested in pounding dirt into tires, and I'm not planning to. Sand is self compacting for the most part and even though this is mixed with broken caliché, it should work fine. If I'm not happy with the way it is compressing then I'll rent or borrow what the construction guys call a "jumping jack" around here, a gasoline powered vibrator that bounces on a large steel plate on the bottom, used to compact trench fill. Once I get the walls up to 10' I will build a shallow 3' tall ferrocement dome on top. I will leave a 6' opening in the center as a second exit via spiral staircase. The 10' wall height will allow for lofts IF I start getting cramped inside. On top of the ferrocement will be a layer of //the on-topic buzzword// papercrete with water barrier above, then a variable layer of dirt, thick on the edges and thin near the center hole. The closer you get to the surface the more the temperature varies so the papercrete will alleviate some of that. I don't need insulation in the lower walls and dumping sand into a hole is easier than mixing papercrete.
I just got confirmation of a helper for most of the month of August, and I'll start gathering tires before then. My best guestimate is about 500 tires, and there are many times that number within a few minutes driving time, scattered along almost every desert road.
The yellowish part represents the ground, just a plug out of old Mother Earth. The dome is formed by thirty flat rebar circles that are interlocked together and secured as the approximate surface of a spherical section.
OK, I'm done for now : )
Anybody interested in joining in the fun, come on down!
-- spaceman All opinions expressed or implied are subject to change without notice upon receipt of new information. http://Starship-Enterprises.Net blog at http://Starship-Enterprises.Net/wordpress/
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