Sunday, July 18, 2010

Strawbale houses

We went across to the Mudgee Small Farm Field Days on Friday... it was good to get back as we have missed them for the last 5 years or so. 

One of our highlights was checking out the strawbale house display - it was great to see and hear about some of the benefits of straw bale buildings... the kids even got onto the local TV news talking about strawbale houses.

Some of the features of building with strawbales that appealed to us were:

1. That straw is a renewable resource - a waste product - that has a very low embodied energy.

2.  We loved the earthy look of the strawbale house finishes along with the fact that they can be made from healthy building materials and clean up at the buidling site is much easier with the main building material being able to be used as garden mulch!

3.  Probably most impressive is the insulating properties of strawbales as a building product - strawbale walls having an R-ratings of up to 9 compared the low R-ratings of other building products.  I like the idea that if combined with a passive solar design strawbale houses should not require artificial heating or cooling - WOW.

Here are some phots of the strawbale buildings being constructed at the AREC site  at Mudgee.





A website that we will be looking at in more detail will be Ausbale - The Australasian Straw Bale Building Association.

1 comment:

  1. That would have been great to see straw bale home constrction. Wouldn't a straw bale home be lovely! If our backyard didn't flood reglarly i'd love to build a straw bale chook pen and shed.

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