Good points on hay vs straw Susan. It's definitely a viable building method, hope to be using it myself before too long.

JohnE

The Mongols have been living this way for thousands of years. Their shelters (yurts) only maintain a fire for cooking and entertaining. Their sleeping quarters are a small tent of yak skin with the fur inside. It is tightly closed and heated by body heat. And this is in Mongolian winter (close neighbor to Siberia).

If I didn't have so many damned cats, I would try a yurt. I think they could bust out of that pretty easily though.

"If I didn't have so many damned cats, I would try a yurt. I think they could bust out of that pretty easily though."

I spent a weekend in one of the insulated yurts in an Oregon campground. Pretty solid construction, small electric heater, couldn't see any gaps, no drafts, framed door and windows, solid door.

If you happen to find yourself along the Oregon coast, find one of the State parks that has them for rent. Quite nice, actually, even in a cold, windy, rainy October.

Pacific Yurts

Sue

There's a lot to be said for traditional construction methods. People all over the world have already devised excellent solutions during the course of history. Case in point, anyone who's ever travelled in the Sahara desert is probably well aware of just how cooler and more comfortable the older mud brick buildings are opposed to the more "modern" concrete and brick houses that are now becoming much more common.

It doesn't take too much effort to adapt these solutions to our particular needs and modern technology. But trying too hard to come up with something "new" too often leads to reinventing the wheel, I'm afraid. Also, few people building their own passive house nowadays understand their environment well enough to devise an optimal construction. The vast majority of us simply have not lived with nature as closely as our ancestors and don't know the environment well enough.

I've seen a guy who built a house almost entirely out of clay, straw and a little wood. It might have been just perfect for an arid climate but he built it in a fairly cold area with plenty of rainfall. The insulation is still excellent but the rain and snow degrade the mud walls to the point where they require serious repair at least once per year. Not that the repair itself is costly but it needs to be much more frequent than most people with a reasonably modern lifestyle could tolerate IMHO. On the other hand, had the gentleman in question only looked a bit closer at the traditional houses in the area (mostly wood), he might well have selected a different design much more appropriate for his region.

I have lived two different cold drafty old farm houses.
Both were well over a hundred years old. Both had flower beds around them.
Both had full basements.
I used to pile straw about a foot deep over the flower beds and up against the house. More to protect the foundation walls from getting pushed in by frost than to save the roses. Then when it snowed the straw would be covered by snow up to three feet most winters
In the spring I used to rototill the half rotted straw into my garden.

I only had wood heat in those houses and as I said, they were drafty, almost unheatable.
If you left a jug of milk on the table overnight it would have ice in it in the morning.
Yet even if I was away for a month the basements never froze, I never had frozen pipes, and if I pulled back the snow and straw the flower beds would have been diggable in the coldest months of the year.
Straw and snow are great insulators and the ground in most places around the world is about 41 degrees fahrenheit.

I also had fewer mice in the house when I did this, I guess they preferred the straw to nest in than the uninsulated walls. I also had fewer weeds and more fishing worms in the flower beds for some reason.

I guess geothermal energy does not always need to be highly technical or pricey.

Actually, images of Luke Skywalker's home in Star Wars come to mind when you mentioned that adobe-covered dome house. Y'know, the one belonging to Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru.

Yeah, but you know how they ended up...