This article appeared on ABC News | By Georgia Hitch for Grand Designs Australia
Hempcrete house with horse manure render proves possibilities of sustainable living
All below information was provided by this article which appeared on ABC News | By Georgia Hitch for Grand Designs Australia
Dan Rawlins and his partner Chloe Meyer set themselves an ambitious target when they decided to build an off-grid house made from hempcrete and rendered with a horse manure mix, all without ever having built a house before.
And while that might sound like a recipe for disaster, the couple had experience weathering difficulty — literally — after living in a shipping container with an outdoor kitchen through several Tasmanian winters.
“The vision for me is really about having a crack at a sustainable alternative and having a place that feels fun and creative to live in,” Dan told ABC iview’s Grand Designs Australia.
“It’s going to be a fairly comfortable hemp [house]. Not as small as a cottage, but a hemp house.”
Dan said the decision to use hemp came about after many hours of research.
“The more I burrowed into the YouTube wormhole, the more it seemed too good to be true,” he said.
“[Hemp has] got excellent insulation. It’s fireproof, it’s mould proof, it’s vermin proof, it’s vapour permeable.
“It lasts for hundreds of years, it’s actually carbon negative so it sequesters more carbon. The actual building will be carbon negative at the end.”
But it took a few more years for he and his dad to design the house, and for him to save up enough money to fund its construction.
With Dan’s tight $300,00 budget, his goal was to build an off-grid house in just under a year that included:
- 30-centimetre thick exterior hempcrete walls
- Double glazed windows
- Horse manure render mix
- Cast iron wood stove
- Composting outdoor toilet
- Solar panels
As well as a breathtaking view of the river, the block also backs onto the forest which bestowed on Dan a much-needed budget win.
Hempcrete goes in
After nine months of building, Chloe returned from Oxford just in time for the mammoth task of laying the hempcrete.
Given their lack of funds, Dan and Chloe relied on the goodwill and energy of keen community members who volunteered to help.
Everyone got a job, and a bucket, to load Dan’s hempcrete mix into the wall brackets.
The hempcrete mix was made of the stalks of the hemp plants, lime, a small amount of cement, water and pozzolan, which reacts with the lime over time to cure the mix.
The magic of hemp is that the mix is full of air pockets which makes it breathable but about an eighth of the weight of concrete.
However, mix it wrong and the strength and durability of the walls are at risk.
After it was mixed, the crew spread it in 100-millimetre-thick layers, tamped it down and continued with another bucket.
When he removed the wall braces Dan was greeted with sturdy and cured walls, a sign his mix and the installation was a success.
“It feels kind of surreal to be honest. [For it] to be so long and then suddenly within a period of a couple weeks all your walls just go ‘Bang’ and they’re up.”
It took Dan, Chloe and their mighty crew six weeks before all the walls were in and finished.
All below information was provided by this article which appeared on ABC News | By Georgia Hitch for Grand Designs Australia
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