Eco in Denmark: Another album

Here is another album from ecovillage "Fri og Fro" in Odsherred, uploaded by Mette Petersen (www.okoliv.dk) living in this ecovillage. Pictures of the homes. Added to the pictures are nice descriptions (in danish) of the building material:

Eco in Denmark: Not everyone is building.. houses for free! :)

As many have discovered, it takes some time to accomplish a house where you need both effective heating value and the trend is that you're able to sell and not only use energy from your household. Which is why many homes in ecovillages takes time; because you are constantly discovering new green improvements and want to implement it. Still, the house itself, with all its fundament and material, does not necessarily need to book all your everyday meetings. For people on ecovillage Friland who works fulltime and some are in media business rather than farming business and need to get their deadlines to run, there are of course options for these, too! At the moment, I know that the community on phase three is planning some pre-prepared constructions for newcomers who are not so used to building from scratch and might need a helping hand with the ecological fundament, and when the pre-made construction is up they only need to use their imagination and personal sence to fill in the extra space almost like restoring an old apartement which many are used to do in forehand. A very good idea! Maybe not so hard-core knowledge based as you won't get to understand why you're building like this and this, but on the other hand one gets more time to accomplish the rest of the house and garden, and perhaps one can also implement faster the energy-solutions out there. For an even faster solution, one can do like Peter did! :) A friend of mine from Friland who is working alot in daytime with designing and writing books for instance, and of course he would't like this quality of life to compromise with building. There are several options for that, as mentioned with the pre-installations, but he chose something rather quick and for FREE: An old house to be demolited if not carried on WEELS! It costed him no more than 40000DKK to improve, some transport as you can see underneath (but in the long run that is nothing), and the house for free:) Good as new.

House's original position.

Up we go! :)

dum-di-dum here comes your free order, not free transport :)

House's new sunny spot!

Eco in Denmark: Arriving at ecovillage Friland, Djursland



Boat ride on Sept 2nd in a 4 hour sail with other wwoofers and hosts.

About time for some updates. Arriving at "Friland" (Freeland) in Djursland on August 30th and now it is the 5th of September, and many exciting things are going on here already. Right now, I am at the fantasy house of Einer's, who cannot stand squares -so all his equipment and house is formed un-square (soon to be uploaded!), and my previous host until September 4th, was Caroline and Tahir from Pakistan as posted below in the supportlink. 

Arriving at ecovillage Friland, I first started whitewashing the outside wall of my host with calc and water mixed, to cover the brownish straw bales. The house also hosted a kitchen garden, as Friland stribes to become a hundred percent self-sustained as households. Their goals are pretty ambitious, both self-sustained, but also free from all loans. And most of them, has houses and area built for less than 300.000 DKK, which includes material. There is about 100.000 for material, and 200.000 for VVS,watersupply and common area costs. The host I first arrived to is on phase 2 of Friland, which means they are houses in building after phase 1 is almost finished. Phase 3 is in planning, and right now I am just gazing at the open yellow field there. Even though there are plenty more "fantasy buildings" here than at Fri & Fro in Odsherred where I was at first, I'd say I am still waiting for that badass hippie, and most of those who came here are simply average danish families, mostly with first-born children, often from the city and tired of the noices there, and the big wavy skirts and rasta-hairdos are still nowhere to be seen... hmm. Surprising, even here.

My current host's greenhouse, where I am working

Eco in Denmark: Straw bale houses earth quake resistant

My host in ecovillage "Friland", Caroline Meyer White at Engineers Without Borders in Denmark, is currently working on a specific building project in Pakistan after the flood. She and the engineers are building earth quake friendly straw bale houses with the right technique, to shelter the homeless during the cold winter to arrive! This is for the northern parts of Pakistan, where simple tents won't be enough. And here we also learned something new about straw bale houses: When constructed as explained in the link below, they are tested as earth quake resistant! This way, their new houses will not only shelter them, but also keep them more safe in the years to come, and.. it will be much cheaper to build and easier and faster to build as the locals are brought in who already know much of such building and local material is being used.

NEW INPUT: Straw and compressed straw as one of many natural materials, is different to metal/ bricks and compact material, as straw "breathes" and makes holes and space for the air to flow within its structure, so when the ground shakes the material itself "shakes" in circles with airflow and is more unlikely to collapse than a four-edge, thick wall-structure with no natural "airflow".

From abstract: "The objective of the shake table tests was to assess the seismic response of a 14’ x 14’ x 10’ full-scale house constructed with heavy detailing. The input motion was the Canoga Park Topanga Canyon record of the 1994 Northridge, California earthquake, Mw 6.7. The house was subjected to eight levels of seismic shaking, beginning at 25% of the recorded ground acceleration and increasing at 25% increments. The house survived 0.82g, twice the acceleration of the Canoga Park record. Although severely damaged, the building did not appear in danger of collapse, even at the end of the test sequence."

(Video of shake-table test below, requires Flash):

More information here: http://nees.unr.edu/projects/straw_bale_house.html

And at PAKSBAB: http://www.paksbab.org/

Donation-site (danish): SUPPORTPAKISTAN.DK

Photos and descriptions from Eco in Denmark