General: Earthship Brighton

Thought this was really interesting.

At the back of my Campus at Sussex University, in Stanmer Park, is a building called Brighton Earthship.

An Earthship is,as described by the website:

"Earthships are cutting edge 'green' buildings, constructed using waste car tyres and other recycled materials. They use the planets natural systems to provide all utilities - using the sun's energy and rain to provide heat, power and water. They are buildings that heat and cool themselves, harvest their own water and use plants to treat their sewage.

Earthships enjoy the weather, regardless of season. If it's raining they catch free water, if it's windy they generate free power and if it's sunny they are capturing free heat and electricity. Apart from using all the resources immediately around them they also employ extensive energy efficiency and water conservation measures, ensuring that the rainwater and renewable energy they harvest goes as far as possible."

The Brighton Earthship is the first in the UK. I'm hopefully going to go on a tour soon. It definately appeals to me as a designer, as this is possibly an area of work I could be involved with in the future.

The total cost is £330,000, which seems incredibly steep for a 5 room house. However, this is essentially a "prototype" (in the loosest sense of the word) and real world production costs would be much much lower, possibly as low as £15-50000.

Here's the link.

http://www.lowcarbon.co.uk/earthship-brighton

If you're ever in my area, thoroughly worth a visit I reckon.

omg i went there in year 10 (two years ago) when they were building it!

ITS ABSOLUTELY AWESOME!
The tour is wicked! the whole place is awesome, not just that, but the other projects. I know that they are building it to create a community centre for all the people who have plots up there.

i want to build a house like that, on a bigger scale, so that it has two floors. I have it all mapped out in my head haha

what course you doing at university?

Lol. I'm guessing you live near-ish me then - and you probably went to that lecture on my campus.
I study Product Design, in my second year, currently on the border between a 2.1 and a First, but hopefully with the summer term ahead of me, I can try and push for the first. Time will tell.
I enjoy Uni very much, but my course doesn't have many lectures. In fact, I only went to one lecture throughout the whole of Springterm, for a course based around Matlab.

I think it's a shame that many building contractors, civil/structural engineers and architects seem to not be making so much effort with this kind of progress towards self-contained living. And instead, are churning out houses like they come off a production line.
Interesting stuff about the Bank of America, too.
I'm wondering, if this self-contained building can be made viable commercially, how likely it'd be that we'd start seeing them actually being built as a replacement for conventional houses. I suspect we're more likely to see more normal houses implement some of its designs features, bit by bit. That's probably the best we can hope for in the near future.

Posted By: Spode

Nice to see you stop by Lorna

I blame that crazy credit crunch malarkey for keeping me busy at work and off the interweb. Such jolly japes we've been having.

I failed Physics at A Level. I could have probably done OK if I'd put in the required workload. But spending 3 hours a night trawling through equations and stuff like that just isn't up my street.
I've worked in a Civil Engineering company for my WE before. It was good.....but I found the work very repetetive. I think there's only so many 2 up 2 down houses I could do stress equations for before I'd be banging my head on the door!
If you want to visit University of Sussex Campus book a tour on one of the open days coming up.
Come visit US.

(Geddit? )

We have what they call green houses being built in Cleveland. There constructed with standard building materials, but with an eye on the highest efficiency available in windows, doors, very heavily insulated and sealed. There built so tightly we have to add make up air to maintain indoor air quality. A 3 bedroom, 2 bath, living room, dining/kitchen, office/den with full basement can be heated with a 60,000 btu 90% furnace and cooled with a 2 ton a/c system.
To put that into perspective the same house built to normal specs, uses 100,000 btu 90% furnace and 3.5 ton a/c system. The cost difference is about $25-30,000.