I would like to thank Mike Reynolds for giving me permission to transcribe, edit and reformat this work for the Steem Blockchain! If you do read or watch this and have any questions please ask in the comments. I am happy to educate and help you to understand this. Biotecture is amazing in so many ways, and even after 20 years I still have not seen a model of sustainable building that even comes close in so many important areas such as performance, carbon footprint, longevity, ease of build, etc... Now you can also come to understand what Biotecture Really Is about!

Commentary

Being self sufficient is important for so many reasons. Water has to be one of the top priorities for anyone living off grid. Depending on and depleting aquifers is no longer sustainable. Most of the world is struggling to deal with water scarcity, and even wet countries like the UK have hosepipe bans very quickly once the summer arrives. The irony is it can be pouring with rain, with billions of litres of clean water dumping into sewage systems and being totally wasted.. whilst Joe Blogs is unable to water his lawn and has to pay large bills to cover the inefficiencies of a centralised water grid.

The concept of Biotecture is based largely on being the boss of your own life , and not being vulnerable.. Whether that be due to climate change, or life circumstances. Just getting ill or injured can mean that you can no longer work and afford to pay the bills! Being self sufficient for water not only means that you can be secure, self sufficient, and sustainable.. but you also get reliable clean drinking water without poisons and toxins like Chlorine and Fluoride... and to cap it all you don’t even have to pay for it!

Earthship Seminar Transcription Session 2 - Part 3

So this water is clean clear rainwater and we use it four times, and that's the the nature of the system. The water board is a crucial element in the building... we've evolved and developed it and and we we ship it all over the world. The DC pump that pumps it just takes a fraction of electricity, it's about a hundred and sixty dollar item. We usually advise people have one or even two on hand, I mean it should last five or six years so we don't know what's gonna happen in the future so if you got a couple extra pumps you're good for fifteen or twenty years.

So... you know because we're looking at whatever in the future... So that makes you in total control of your water you find yourself... this is the same with electricity too... but if you're looking at the weather and it says showers for the next three or four days, take a long take a long bath... take a long shower... you always will have enough to live, but sometimes you can live more luxuriously on water, sometimes you can live more luxuriously on power, depending on what your weather is... you kind of relate to the weather.

So that gives you water from the sky... that's as simple as that... it's taken the place of pumping water from a deep aquifer and taking a lot of electricity to do so... and depleting the aquifers which are finite eventually... and depleting the aquifers affects things underneath the earth, and definitely has an effect on the planet. Like I was telling you yesterday in whatever county that is in California... they have depleted their aquifers, created a vacuum suck the salt water in and polluted their aquifers and then dump their sewage in on top of that... so you know it's like we do affect things... but just harvesting water off your roof from the sky is a pretty harmless way to live on this planet.

So - before I take that into the sewage, what we do for hot water is... Europe has been using gas demand hot water heaters for years. There are there are water heaters that the cold water comes in and they flash on due to a pressure release valve whenever you turn the tap on... and the water gets flash heated... its on demand flash heated... and so that water comes in cold it... goes through a coil and gets flash heated... and comes out hot. So it uses propane, but in an area like this you hardly use any propane because what they have is a sensor that if the cold water coming in... but we don't push cold water in there... we take the cold water from our pump in our pressure tank... to panels on the roof first that are always in this climate getting Sun. So that's hot water... then it goes to the gas demand hot water heater... so then it's coming in most of the time hot. The sensor senses that it's hot and if flash heater doesn't come on. Only if it's cool from 6 cloudy days in a row or something does the flash heater come on.

In Montana the gas hadn't even been hooked up and the guy had a hot screaming hot shower he was blown away you know there was no utilities coming to the buildingbackup.

So we send solar hot water through this 90% of the time in this climate, and it doesn't need to come on... and you go on with solar hot water. So this is part of the system you'll see this on the Sutton and on global model... that has different panels than the electrical panels out front... thery are the solar hot water and roof melt panels... and so we get hot water from the Sun with gas back up, propane back up... and of course in a cloudier area you would use a little more propane than we use here, but still it stores it an insulating insulated tank. So you you like when we were in Montana the gas hadn't even been hooked up and the guy had a hot screaming hot shower he was blown away you know there was no utilities coming to the building... and you know he knew what he was buying but he just hadn't seen it all working for him yet... and the plumber was there and the electrician was there and everybody's just standing around, like it was the first hot shower they had ever seen... you know we're all going "oh my god " you know the water is coming out the faucet there's no power lines there there's no well... and it's hot! And so it works.

So and you you are in charge of it... in control of it the quality of it you're not getting chemicals thrown in it that you have to deal with that you don't know whether they're causing cancer or not

So this gives you what I call hot and cold running water, which is thrilling if you're doing it yourself. So and you you are in charge of it... in control of it the quality of it you're not getting chemicals thrown in it that you have to deal with that you don't know whether they're causing cancer or not... Like I was just in Baja a few weeks ago, because we're doing a project down there, and the guy that I'm doing the project for is living with his family in Mexico City right now... and he was saying that Mexico City is five months away from being out of water... you know they get a lot of rainfall, but they won't they run it off of reservoirs... and the reservoirs are low and not filling back up. Can you imagine however many millions of people there are in Mexico City, being all there without water... it's going to be chaos.

He was telling me London's running out of water and I'm like Jesus Christ all that water just goes down the storm drains mixes with the sewage and goes into the ocean or the channel or whatever

 

Simple Wastwater Solutions digestor and plant filters at Ivan Kitson’s, Waiheke Island
IMAGE SOURCE & MORE INFO

So that's what people are looking forward to, and here they are in Mexico City... they get three times as much rain as we do. Another situation was I was in London a few years ago in a taxi going from the airport to town, and it was raining so hard that the guys windshield wipers couldn't keep up with it... in one of those little black cabs... and our conversation was about London running out of water. He was telling me London's running out of water and I'm like Jesus Christ all that water just goes down the storm drains mixes with the sewage and goes into the ocean or the channel or whatever and I mean... and I have endless stories like that... I had people come to a seminar and go up to Washington State to build an Earthship, and they said we like everything about him but we're just a little reluctant on this water catchment system... so that we were going to do a well and we'll pay for the extra panels to pump it and whatever... and they called me up and they're talking about... because I was consulting them through the project... and they said "well we gotten started we're drilling our well, but we just can't you know can't get our well drilled because it won't stop raining"... so it's uh it's strange out there in the real world.

So this can work anywhere... you know there's even when you get down to five or four inches you can extend it and make it work water comes from the sky... we can use it. Another thing I like about it that I hate about the real world is there's no infrastructure. See we're we've got our own water on-site from the sky. We got our own power on-site from the sky... we treat our own sewage on-site. The Hopi Indians when I first came out here a long time ago... I got the the myth or the legend that they say and have said many years... that the earth is going to be taken over by spiderwebs. When I go back to the cities I see it you know... I look through through wires at dirty skies and there's pipes. Albuquerque and Santa Fe have so many pipes and wires and conduits underground you have to get a permit to dig a hole in your own backyard.

 

Cistern building with re-used cans | Dry Creek Earthship

IMAGE SOURCE

So under-ground and above-ground there's pipes and wires and infrastructure that takes a lot of money to build, a lot of money to upkeep... it goes down like when the ice got on the lines in in the Northeast a few years back, and six million people were without power. Infrastructure is our cake... it's a thing of the past... it's expensive, it's ugly... not to mention like like, a lot of the places I've been recently looking at sites to build earthships... there's beautiful land but there's those giant standards of you know... power lines going through it, and it's just worthless. And it's marching all across the state and that's what they had trouble fighting. They were fighting that when we were in France... they wanted to take a giant power line from central France down to the south of France and condemn a bunch of farms and houses and things along the way... just to deliver power... and they're gonna lose half of it from land resistance on the way there anyway. It is insane... what we're doing infrastructure is... I hate it.

I just think it's... you know... people talk about it... the president is even talking about it, you know.. and the way he's being advised is to get a solar power system and shove it back into the line grid when you're not using it. All that does is is reinforce the need for the line grid... when really you need to be you need to decrease the need for the line grid, because all they're going to do is continue to make more of them. So like I say it's expensive, it's contaminating in every way, and takes a lot of maintenance... and it makes you vulnerable...

And it's simply you're the boss of this ship right here... and you're not vulnerable.

In a house that does everything... this home is encountering the Sun and the wind, and the rain and the thermal mass of the earth... and it's simply you're the boss of this ship right here... and you're not vulnerable. And that's something for the future because if we had this great economic crisis here in the last couple of years, as well as fuel shortages and so on... and the gasoline and all of that... how vulnerable do you want to be?

Your water supply to your home, in a conventional home, is affected by almost everything... including an economic crisis... and it puts you vulnerable to rising prices.

Your home can be absolutely not vulnerable... to any of that... I mean the power goes... if the economics go down, does that mean the infrastructure is going to go down? If they run out, if they have a shortage of fuel, does that mean the infrastructure is going to go down? The infrastructure is subject to that, I said something in the water from the sky book... that anything that goes down water is going to be affected by it.. in other words, if if line grids go down, the water is being pumped through the cities... that's going to affect water. If there's fuel shortages, that's going to affect water... if there are natural holocaust, that's going to affect water. If there are droughts that's obviously going to affect water... Your water supply to your home, in a conventional home, is affected by almost everything... including an economic crisis... and it puts you vulnerable to rising prices... and you know... everybody has heard about the people in the cities that freeze to death because they can't pay their utility bill and on and on and on

Everybody has heard about the people in the cities that freeze to death because they can't pay their utility bill...

So anyway... just the overview of one of these kind of homes is... not only carbon zero, in the logical correct thing to do to keep a green planet - you know - in terms of ecology... but it's the best way to save your own ass as well... so and everything really comes from that.

So the that's water that's how we get it and it's working here you'll see it in every one of the buildings. It's been working here for for twelve or so years fourteen years, I don't know how this building is anymore... but it's really gone it gotten improved... and in every one of these systems, is improving constantly. The older buildings do it... but the newer buildings just do it so much cleaner. I mean I would compare this building and say the studio building over there... to like a 49 Ford, and the newer buildings are like you know a 2009 BMW... and they're gonna keep getting better and better. It's just, yes the 49th or it'll get you from Maine to California... but the BMW will get you there with a lot more fun and better tunes and air conditioning and whatever... better handling. And so that's the way the new buildings are.

 

Learn More:

Earthship grey water filtration system

How to Filter and Purify Rainwater ( Earthship Style WOM )

Earthship Seminar Video 2009 - Session 2 -Part 3

 

READ PREVIOUS TRANSCRIPTS

SESSION 1

Part 1: The Global Model
https://steemit.com/ecotrain/@eco-alex/earthship-biotecture-101-learn-with-michael-reynolds-part-1

Part 2: Staying Cool: The Convection Engine
https://steempeak.com/ecotrain/@eco-alex/earthship-biotecture-transcribed-seminar-with-michael-reynolds-transcribed-part-2

Part 3: The Evolution of the Global Model Earthship:
https://steempeak.com/ecotrain/@eco-alex/earthship-biotecture-transcribed-seminar-with-michael-reynolds-part-3

Part 4: Heating your home with body heat in Norway, about permits in USA and Europe... How to get them fast
https://steempeak.com/ecotrain/@eco-alex/earthship-biotecture-transcribed-pt4-heating-your-home-with-body-heat-in-norway-about-permits-in-usa-and-europe-how-to-get-them

Part 5: How to Retrofit, Getting Permits, Tire Toxicity?
https://steempeak.com/ecotrain/@eco-alex/earthship-biotecture-transcribed-pt-5-how-to-retrofit-getting-permits-tire-toxicity

Part 6: Bottle / Can Walls, Tyre Foundations / Snow Water
https://steempeak.com/ecotrain/@eco-alex/earthship-biotecture-transcribed-pt-6-q-and-a-bottle-can-walls-tyre-foundations-snow-water

Part 7:&: Can you insure an earthship?, the double/triple greenhouse, the global model evolution + more
https://steempeak.com/ecotrain/@eco-alex/earthship-biotecture-transcribed-pt-7-q-and-a-can-you-insure-an-earthship-the-double-triple-greenhouse-the-global-model

Part 8: Final: Year round fruiting trees, sizing greenhouses + more
https://steempeak.com/ecotrain/@eco-alex/earthship-biotecture-transcribed-pt-8-final-q-and-a-year-round-fruiting-trees-sizing-greenhouses-more

SESSION 2

Part 1: Water, how to size your roof, choosing the right materials for water catchment.
https://steempeak.com/ecotrain/@eco-alex/earthship-biotecture-transcribed-session-2-part-1-water-how-to-size-your-roof-choosing-the-right-materials-for-water-catchment

Part 2: Cisterns, Filtering Water, Designing Down & Layered Thinking.
https://steempeak.com/ecotrain/@eco-alex/earthship-biotecture-transcribed-session-2-part-2-cisterns-filtering-water-designing-down-and-layered-thinking

 

Did you know, I built four Earthships in India as well as being instrumental the creation of the first Earthship in the UK, Earthship Brighton. If you are also on this path and would like to read my story, I have recently published a book. It is not only a great story, but a valuable resource for you to learn from. I had no experience or training when I embarked on my mission, but managed to successfully build a gorgeous home called Earthship Karuna.

You can buy this book with Steem on the homesteaders co-op. Whilst you are there please do have a look at some of the other products as there are all kinds of great things there!

https://homesteaderscoop.com/product/earthship-chronicles-ebook/

If you don't have any Steem you can also buy the ebook and paperback on amazon.
http://mybook.to/Earthship-Chronicles
or
https://www.amazon.com/Earthship-Chronicles-sufficient-luxurious-experience-ebook/dp/B07MYCBXYB

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