Thatched eco-house

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Evgeny Shirokov is the author of the technology of ecological housing construction in Belarus, also known as the president of the Belarusian branch of the International Academy of Ecology and the head of the UN Center "Habitat" (habitat).

Many years ago in Moscow, he participated in the creation of autonomous space laboratories, modeled dwellings for cosmonauts. Then the idea was born to create a completely independent residential building.

Having experience in the construction of a thatched house (in 1996), Yevgeny Shirokov in the Belarusian village of Beloruchi realized his dream of building a zero-energy eco-house - a completely autonomous house that does not require either gas or electricity from outside. Under this condition, a person is responsible for the operation of the house only to himself and his family, and such a family is not afraid of any crises.

The house in Beloruchi was erected in just 3 months: a wooden frame was built on a foundation made of bottles, which was filled with straw blocks and plastered with clay.

Evgeny Shirokov recommends making houses out of straw for a number of reasons:

- straw increases the energy potential of a person by more than 5%, while a tree is neutral in relation to human energy, and a brick lowers energy by 5-10%. In the old days, much was known about the medicinal properties of straw. Everyone slept on straw mattresses, including the "king, father". The straw was changed every year, and knowledgeable people could determine what kind of health problems a person had using last year's straw;

- straw is 4 times better than wood in terms of heat engineering characteristics and 7 times better than brick. In the Novosibirsk Academgorodok, a heat engineering calculation of a straw wall was carried out. The calculation showed that with an outer wall 80 cm thick, houses in Siberia and the Urals can not be heated from pressed straw blocks with batteries, only a stove will be enough, while fuel consumption is five times less than in an ordinary rural house. The walls keep warm. House heating costs will not exceed 20 kilowatt hours per year per square meter, while the norm for an apartment building is 120 kilowatt hours per square meter;

- the cost of building a house made of straw, in comparison with the housing offered by the modern market, is reduced by 40-50%;

- a wall made of plastered straw blocks is much more resistant to fire than a wooden structure, because there is not enough combustion air in the straw blocks due to the pressing.

In his blog, E. Shirokov writes: "The Ecohouse was built taking into account the principles of Feng Shui and the Old Russian proportioning system" Vsemer ", coming from the parameters of a person, and not an artificial standard measuring 1 meter. The house has a wind turbine (400 W), photovoltaic panels (300 W), a solar water-heating collector (2x2 sq. M.), An alkaline battery storage system and a backup 1.5-kilowatt generator. In terms of materials and equipment, we met $ 10,000 (about the same cost for a permit to connect a cottage to power grids in the Moscow region). with a total area of 72 sq.m. was started in August, finished in December, cost half the cost of a one-room apartment, although the level of comfort and consumer qualities of such an eco-house is incomparably higher (for example, a Russian bathhouse inside, natural clay plaster inside and outside, a fireplace and a highly efficient stove with a low couch, built-in furniture made of solid oak, alder and pine, etc.).

The eco-house is completely decoupled from the central networks, consumes less than 20 kWh per year per square meter and is in many ways similar to an orbital station - you do not need to pay for electricity, water and sewage, you just need to use natural material and energy flows wisely, not worsening, but improving the condition environment in the course of its life. Therefore, during its construction, secondary building materials were used as much as possible: bricks from a destroyed farm in a neighboring village, bottles from a landfill for a ring energy-efficient foundation 0.5 m wide, walls were made of agricultural waste - baled straw, the roof will be insulated with reed from a nearby lake, clay on plaster taken while digging a cellar next to the house, even an old cast-iron bath found an effective use: 1/3 was made of a classic cast-iron fireplace, and 2/3 went to an almost eternal and free heater in the bath (heaters that can be bought on construction markets for 500- 1000 cu are made of sheet iron 2.5-4 mm thick - their short service life is well known to avid bathers).

As for the sewerage system, the dwelling is equipped with a biological waste disposal system. With the help of bacteria, they are processed into fertilizer for the backyard.

The total specific energy consumption for the construction of such an eco-house is many tens and even hundreds of times lower than the traditional construction of bricks and gas silicate - both due to the practical absence of firing materials, and due to the non-use of heavy equipment, cranes, etc. … (this also allows you to minimize the costs of both construction and landscaping and improvement - even the natural lawn around the eco-house is not damaged during such construction). Well, after its "death" in a hundred or more years, such an eco-house does not cause problems - its components return to the natural circulation of organic matter and minerals.

German specialists came to Yevgeny Shirokov, the author of 60 patents and inventions, to study, after which the construction of thatched houses became widespread in Germany. In Russia, green building, although it is gaining momentum, is not as fast as we would like. By the way, in Russia, 800 million tons are produced annually in the fields. rye and wheat straw, from which 2,600,000 houses of 150 sq.m. could be built annually.

Video about the thatched house in Beloruchi: