The time has come to stop making cement stabilized compressed earth blocks (CEB) and mortar them into a wall and a building. We needed 2000 blocks to begin and the nice weather this spring has allowed us to make that many.

This gives you an idea of what 2000 CEB blocks...

We all have a framework with which we interpret events in our lives and around the world. Any significant event must be given meaning, and we do this by fitting it into a pattern that makes sense to us. What we rarely question is how we got the pattern recognition syst...

We had figured out the new soil and cement mixtures. We had poured the slab with a stem wall, and so it was back to making blocks.

I turned the key to get hydraulic flow and the beast just lurched and groaned. I jumped the battery…more groaning. It was a 10 year old...

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How a builder imagines the block wall will go together must be clear from the start. You can have blueprints but nothing can take the place of visualization. Here we took some of the discarded test blocks and placed them as they were imagined on t...

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I wanted to make sure that the stem wall (that hopefully all CEB block walls will be built on) was unified with the slab. You need a 3.5inch high wall above the slab floor exactly the width of the CEB block wall to prevent any floodwater (ei...

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Once the pour gets under way, you need three people to get it placed quickly since it will get hot in the truck after a time. Two people push and pull the 2x4 screed board while the third feeds it to be sure the surface is level and the body...

CEB foundation and wall sketch

The sketch above of the entry door for our energy building shows you the basic design of the foundation slab, the piers under each corner and door posts with “toothed” blocks that will be encased in reinforced concrete around the door fra...

We were extremely happy to have cracked the code for mixing cement and silt for CEB block making. However, the line between too much water and not enough required so much shoveling and inspecting in the pile that, once we proved it could be done, we gave up on the old,...

My ancient Babylonian 36 volt direct solar to D/C water pump from Dankoff solar days finally died. I’ve used it for more than 15 years, day in day out. I still may try to resurrect it because to replace it new now costs over $1500. Cheaper to convert to A/c.

In this he...

In 24 years of living on this place, we have not experienced such intense heat as has oppressed us and our animals and birds this month. We’ve had a break now, but a week ago nothing could move far or even eat in the inferno! The climate change deniers still have their...