Construction

CEB House Tour – Missouri

It turns out that there’s a CEB contractor by Lathrop, Missouri – which is  within 30 miles from us. Meet Floyd Hagerman, who has built a couple of very interesting CEB houses. The first one shown here is a hybrid – or a combination...

Hexahatch Incubator Prototype Construction and Testing

In the last few weeks I’ve constructed the Hexahatch egg incubator and am now testing it. Here are some pictures of how to make it: It started with Marcin drawing up the basic idea. Then I worked the sketch into a design. When we were satisfied...

Facility Sanitation Improvement (by a factor of ‘e’)

To our colonic relief, we added a second composting toilet, a public outhouse with privacy. Now no one needs to wonder who is going to enter the vestibule while performing defecation maneuvers. Albeit temporary, it satisfies our immediate needs. Thanks...

Health and the Future of Factor e

Molly and I built a hand washing station and I put together a shower Factor e Farm. This post is an analysis of the sanitation issues rooted in geography, infrastructure, and human use following Christopher Alexander’s guidelines for design analysis....

Populating the CEB Addition

We have moved a 1600 pound battery bank and a 500 pound stove into the workshop addition: Now, how about some walls and a roof? Please contribute – we are short on the building materials, and the month is coming to an end:By the way, our blog views...

3000 Bricks and Counting

Upon the suggestion of Reto Stauss of the nachhaltigBeobachtet blog, we have installed the ChipIn widget here for additional transparency in our crowd funding strategy. At the time of this post, we collected $1144, and still have $856 left to go in the...

The Thousandth Brick: CEB Field Testing Report

Is The Liberator – the open source, high performance CEB machine – really worthy of its name? Absolutely. We found that out as we pressed the one thousandth brick yesterday. Bad weather, manpower, and equipment so far has restricted production...

CEB Foundation and Trusses Complete

from 2008. We have finished laying gravel and insulation for the CEB addition foundation. It is a shallow insulated foundation, made with 2″ extruded polystyrene insulation going down 18 inches, plus 1 inch gravel as the fill. There is a drainage...

Factor e Farm Winter CEB Convergence – This Weekend

People, we are getting into major CEB construction. Today we are building trusses for the roof. It will we an workshop addition to the greenhouse, featuring living roof, CEB walls, shallow insulated foundation, masonry stove, plus sauna running off the...

Going Further Off Grid

We are setting up our 15 kWhr battery bank and solar panels – so we’ll be off off-grid for the next few days as we set up the system.  The new system is sufficient to power all of our facility except for the welder. You may not hear from...