Hi James, welcome to the group.
Pulped paper will give you stronger walls than just shredded paper, depending on your mix. Drain the pulp and then use the water remaining in the pulp to moisten your earth and cement mixture. You will definitely want to seal the outside in rainy England.
Why not make the whole building a basement by digging in and then using the extra dirt to berm outside once you have finished your walls? Go down a couple of meters and then you only have to go up enough for some windows. At that depth the earth should keep the temperature reasonable. Don't insulate the bottom of the walls or the floor, use your padobe to insulate everything above ground, and it should stabilize near your annual average temperature. Cover it with a living roof and your neighbors won't even see it except as a bump in your lawn.
I remove the molds from 3' triangles within five to ten minutes. As soon as your mix drains enough to start pulling away from the sides of your form, then you can carefully remove the form and fill it again. The blocks should sit without being disturbed until they are firm enough to turn. That amount of time will vary with the size and shape of your blocks and your local weather conditions. Around here in west Texas when it is 100 degrees F and the wind is blowing 40 mph I can sometimes turn a 3' triangle after one day. A couple more days gets it to the point that I can carry and stack it. But then, we only get 8" of rain a year, probably less than you get in a week. You don't want your curing blocks to be out in the rain, so at least cover them with plastic sheets when it is raining.
spaceman
molded triangle panels
More molded triangle panels
a mixing method
marquee.moon wrote:
Hello I'm starting to work up ideas and plans for an outbuilding in our garden (in northern England, UK). I thought I'd discuss the ideas here to help me shape the way it develops. I'm at the very start of this, and I'm looking for advice & ideas. I have no previous experience of working papercrete or earthcrete. The building will probably be 3m deep x 2.5m tall x 4.5m long. It must look reasonably appealing to the eye. It'll be a single room, single door, single window, roof design yet to be decided on. I'm thinking of putting a root cellar inside for storing wine and preserved foods and root vegetables. The cellar will probably be 1.2m deep x 1.2 m wide, length to be decided. The excavated cellar will provide a volume of earth to be used in constructing the building. The outside of the building needs to be water resistant (northern England gets lots of rain!). I want to keep the inside as cool and dry as possible (for the storage of wine & food), so need to insulate and ventilate well. Any designs that help help achieve this will make my life easier. As well as food & wine storage, the outbuilding will provide storage for the usual stuff: bikes, tools, kids toys etc... It'll probably also have a worktop area. I can get a decent amount of shredded paper from the office I work in (mostly standard printer paper) I've got a few ideas at the moment, some more plausible than others. I'd like someone with experience to say "that wont work…" or "try this idea…" My initial idea is to use a mix of earth, shredded paper and cement, with water to moisten prior to filling sand-bags with the mix. To create an earthcrete/ paper wall. I'm unsure about the proportions of earth/ shredded paper/ cement. In this situation, would the paper need pulping prior to adding to the earthcrete or could I add it as shred? I'm unsure if the volume of earth from my root cellar will provide enough material to construct a 2.5m wall (that depends on the proportion of earth to paper, and the width of the wall), so I'm thinking of a lower wall constructed of earth/papercrete with an upper wall of timber frame and cladding. The roof would thus sit on the timber frame, which in turn would sit on the sandbag wall. Is this a plausible construction technique? Another idea I had was to create blocks from the earth/ shredded paper/ cement, possibly with a hollow centre to make the materials go further and to help with insulation. Any comments? Again, I'm particularly interesting in knowing if the paper would need pulping first, or if shred would work. I'm also interested in knowing how quickly I could remove the blocks from a mould. The chances are, I'd be making the moulds myself, so I would have very few of them, therefore to get a decent number of blocks, they'd need to go through the mould quickly. I'm trying to figure out ways of doing this using pressure to create a harder block faster with less cement (bottle jack press?) Yet another idea is to have load bearing timbers to the ground with infill of earth/paper/ cement. I've been thinking about this a bit, but cant figure it out…any ideas? A final thought I had was to construct flat panels "ex-situ" from shredded paper and cement, probably without the addition of earth. The panels would be screwed or bolted to load bearing timbers, then rendered with an earthcrete render. Has anyone done similar? If you're still reading, thanks! Probably more thoughts and questions to come… cheers, James ------------------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/papercreters/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/papercreters/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:papercreters-digest@yahoogroups.com mailto:papercreters-fullfeatured@yahoogroups.com <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: papercreters-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
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