Earth Tube Cooled Mulch Dome Build-Out TPS-0018

I would like to think that I spent the cooler months wisely by building an Earth tube system, which would be one of the humblest and least extravagant and most praying for it to work experiments.

Earth tube technology, I don't know exactly the most ancient origins of it, but people have been doing very interesting things with them, trying to naturally cool their environments in deserts.

According to Bill Mollison, in the canonical permaculture design course, you have two options. You can establish underground dwellings, like many critters do, to survive the summer heat in the desert. If you dare to dwell above ground in a desert, it would behoove you to install cooling systems, such as Earth tubes.

I'm curious to know more about the deepest roots of this, but it is the technology of running tubes, pipes, basically underground at a specified depth for specified length, that varies based on your climate.

You're leveraging the power of an average sort of static temperature below ground, which is, if I understand correctly, generally above freezing, and generally significantly below the hottest temperatures that bake the surface of the planet during the hottest months of the year.

Some range of soil which is basically buffered from the extreme cold and hot temperatures throughout the year.

So some intelligent folks at some point established this technology of piping air underground, so that you could take the hot air, forcing the air through the tubes with some form of a electrically powered fan or blower system.

There can also be designs that utilize a form of thermo-siphoning.

We know cool air is more dense and it will drop to the lower point.

So if you're able to capture air at a higher point on a landscape and then run it down slope through buried tubes or pipes, then you should have cooler air at a lower point, there's more advanced physics than what I'm explaining here.

I'd prefer not to use fans as they're a single point of failure, that I would have to create redundancy for. If the electrically powered fan or blower fails. Am I just still gonna be cooked alive because the tubes don't work with out it?

I've been places where I've felt the effectiveness of the Earth tube systems, relatively sustainably energized. Fan powered Earth tube system.

So I should give you some visualizations to this. I'm not gonna quote the depth or the length, but I will say that I referred to the canonical PDC and other articles. For my own peace of mind to be able to say to myself, I'm gonna use the specifications, as per these experts, and hope for the best.

But of course, everything goes out the window with these bizarre temperatures on the planet. It's a big ask. It's a lot to ask for me to survive the next year, slightly more comfortable than the last year.

I committed a sin against my zero plastic religion, and I purchased plastic drainage pipes, I dug shovel wide trenches that I could barely fit into at a three foot depth for over a hundred feet in sand and rock. I spent the cooler months, pacing myself to dig out an epic trench so that I could lay down this unperforated drainage pipe.

With it a coupler at both ends of that hundred plus stretch of pipe so that there could be protruding several feet of pipe coming out up slope that I could connect to my solar powered fan.

So after I back filled that trench, the pipe now is connected all the way underground, and it's sealed up with whatever 2'8", give or take of sand

I tested the system and it sends a cool-ish breeze down through that length of pipe into what I what I finished it into, which is a partially underground dome.

It's an adaptation of a playground dome, ten foot wide by five foot high, $200.

Too short for me to stand up in unless I dig down beneath the surface level surface that it sits on.

The air is not as cool as the AC that we would blast in our vehicles but it is colder significantly than the ambient temperature and I tested this on a very hot day.

I better install this thing and pray that it works, so that as the temperature rises, I can go into my little humble dome structure and insulated as best as I can with mulch. That was a experiment unto itself, what is the R factor of the insulation of wood chip/forest floor mulch, where it's a very diverse size and granularity of woody material shredded and chipped together.

I had already experienced successfully using quarter inch hardware cloth to secure a dome from rodents and scorpions and snakes, it was a garden built out of the same style of playground dome.

I covered it with a quarter inch hardware cloth mesh. That was my first experiment with this very affordable dome, it's a ninja obstacle course to get into the dome from the way that I set it up. Because it's only 5 ft. Tall. I can't stand up in it. I have to open a hatch and slide into it and close it up before critters follow me into it. Then I'm secured into my little miniaturized bonsai food forest, and I do my gardening and my harvesting in there.

So I've had the experience of the success of this very pliable, very forgiving, quarter inch hardware cloth. The half inch mesh is far more of a pain to work with. It has its applications, and it's perfect for what it's most applicable for. But when I discovered the quarter inch hardware cloth, it was a revelation for me.

If you're not a homesteader yet, you probably won't appreciate hearing about this, but I will tell you, of all of the discoveries of my life. It is on the top of the charts because with chicken wire and even gopher wire, there are rodents that can squeeze themselves down to the size of a dime to get through anything.

I've had nursery stock that was just decimated by one or more of the rodents that can squeeze themselves down to a dime sized profile to get through gopher wire, chicken wire, etc. So working with the half inch hardware cloth, it's so rigid that it's great for when you need it for that purpose. But if you can get away with the quarter inch hardware cloth. It's night and day, the utility of it for wrapping around things and not shredding you and bleeding you out to death before you can plant anything and subsist on it.

I got some nicks, a few scratches and scrapes with the quarter inch hardware cloth but it slightly more forgiving, slightly less injurious being so pliable and much lighter. Knowing how voracious the appetite of predators can be, I think they would break through through it. It's not the most, most secure. I feel confident that it will keep most rodents out. They're gonna give up on trying to bite through it. But bigger predators….I wouldn't put poultry behind it with bigger predators.

The mulch I get is considered to be some of the cleanest in the region. It's an assemblage of woody material that com from arborists in the city who are trimming trees and grinding stumps, etc. This product is not a bunch of urban green bins filled with dog feces and motor oil and lawn chemical spray, herbicides and pesticides.

The premium material that I purchase, which is worth every penny of its premium value, their promise is that they're shredding and selling the mulch material of arborists and landscapers with some degree of scrutiny.

They're being inspected so that they're bringing in loads of tree trimmings and bush trimmings.

This mulch is a blessed output of city stream of organic material that comes from the above ground plantings, the shrub layer and the lower and upper canopy layer. When those tree branches get too close to power lines, and when those shrubs start to not look like squares anymore, they start to look a little bit wild. Somebody calls the HOA police and then I show up with my crew of landscapers we will come and we will provide the service of making your squared off suburb or your squared off mansion meet the HOA standards.

But the beauty thing is that not only am I getting paid, but I'm also extracting value from that waste stream that would have and often does end up in a landfill.

But me and my comrades, we're extracting that value from the waste stream and turning that mulch. I call it borrowing the mulch to create new forests.

Fungi are the teeth of the forest, and a forest grows on fallen trees, those are some permaculture mantras.

I can't explain what happens in me internally when I feel and look at and work with and play with what I feel to be dank march, I know it's loaded with mycelium waiting to unfurl its magic. So the byproduct of my survival is that a forest is born. I've given birth to a lot of wild mushrooms and a lot of mulch and it never felt it never felt this way. Fledgling mushroom cap heads coming out from the barely consistently hydrated mulch in one of my little planter boxes that I built out of the ruins of the old homestead stick frame house that I salvaged.

Beneath that surface of the fruiting body in the mushroom, there's all of this beneficial support for the health of the soil.

I think about imposing a stick frame home filled with fiberglass and foam sprayed insulation, which is just destined to give people cancer while it's off gassing, and definitely kill them instantaneously if it ever catches on fire. That paradigm of toxic housing that I'm trying to avoid and escape, I say to myself, I'm gonna play the odds of circulated air that is in contact with of cycle of composting organic matter. From my survival is training, it's called building a debris hut. If you build a debris hut in a temperate forest, you're gonna be exposed to a litany of fungal materials.

Your immune system and the natural, normal functioning of your lungs will prevent fungal infection of the lungs. I arrived at the conclusion that I'm gonna gamble, I'm gonna risk it.

I have good airflow, this thing breathes. I'm not living in a zip lock bag. There's airflow, it's relatively dry. I'm just not going fasten a tarp or some plastic or some layer that's not gonna breathe. It's gonna trap those pathogens in.

All I know is that in survival 101 they teach you to build a debris hut where you're taking off dank forest branches, limbs, stuffing up all kinds of forest floor duff to lay on for insulation. It doesn't seem anywhere near on the spectrum of lethality that all kinds of carcinogenic, petroleum based paint, carpets, furniture, insulation, etc...