RODMAN: In this episode of Urban Conversion, Gina and I are dreaming of an eco-friendly home.

If I had my choice right now, I would probably build from the ground up.

GINA: Wow, this is beautiful!

Instead of stepping outside the box, we're rethinking how it's built.

GINA: Why on earth would someone build out of straw bales?

As we explore alternative building techniques that may just end up on our future floor plan.

Do you think we can build a house like this?

All in this Urban Conversion.

GINA: My husband Rodman is passionate about creating new businesses and opportunities, but let's just say he's not too eco-friendly.

RODMAN: My wife Gina, she's amazing, but she can be a little over the top when it comes to going green.

GINA: The sustainability movement is not just a trend.

It's a concept that will impact the future.

RODMAN: I'm not against sustainability.

I just need to understand it first.

Yeah, now we're talking!

So I'm taking myself out of my comfort zone... sometimes to extremes.

Wow.

GINA: And we're making it part of our lives.

(horn honking) RODMAN: Yeah, well, most of it.

GINA: Who knows where it will take us?

Welcome to Michigan, welcome to Detroit, Rodman.

RODMAN: It's all part of making our own "Urban Conversion."

♪ So we saw a lot of really great examples of living in smaller homes.

There are things that I loved about all of them, but when we think about our family of four, we needed something a little bit larger and realistic for our family to be more comfortable in.

RODMAN: So we're coming down to see Brian again today and he's going to show us a little bit more mainstream type construction.

Still sustainable, but more mainstream.

We're back!

Alright.

How'd it go?

I don't think we saw anything that really like hit us and... this is it.

BRIAN: Okay, okay.

That was definitely the extreme end of the green building movement, but maybe we can look at a couple more that are a little larger, but give you a little more sense of maybe the middle.

Rodman and Gina are going to look at this round of houses and these are gonna be a little bit more conventional, little bigger, but also have some pretty radical strategies.

I think we are open to different methods, but I do need some help with these because I have no idea what they are, how they work.

One option that is very green is the retrofit option where we take an existing house and we upgrade it to be a lot more energy efficient.

GINA: I hope Brian wins Rodman over on the retrofit because this is an argument we have all the time.

If I had my choice right now, I would probably build from ground up.

You know, another option, one we have under construction right now is a straw bale house.

Yes.

You're actually using straw bales... Yeah, it's bales of straw.

...as the walls?

Seems a little out there, but...

This house is also a passive house type project.

And what that is, is a standard that evolved in Germany initially, and the idea was to do carbon neutrality, cost effectively, and then you should really go check out some rammed earth walls where they ram earth and add some cement to it, and basically make a structural wall.

It's gonna be very interesting to see these things go from theory into action.

I'm really excited to go out and look at some examples that Brian's sending us on to see what building with the environment in mind looks like.

Let's do it.

Let's go explore.

Okay.

I'm ready.

Phase 2 of exploration.

Phase 2.

I'm just gonna keep an open mind and I'm gonna go into this process knowing that anything goes.

BRIAN: A straw bale house is basically a normal house that the walls are built out of straw bales and it's super insulated to meet the German passive house standard so we're real excited in the US about solar panels or geothermal.

The technology, while really exciting, isn't addressing the core environmental considerations, which is that, you know, buildings use roughly 50 percent of our energy.

So reducing our building energy use, while not super exciting, is really critical to addressing climate change and also just saving people money.

The key metric is the space specific heat demand.

And this is basically how much energy it uses on an annual basis to heat and cool the building.

And this is about ten times lower than an average house.

RODMAN: We had a beautiful drive up here.

We came up into the mountains of Colorado.

We're going to check out a hay bale house.

Straw bale.

Straw bale, hay bale, I don't know, whatever.

There is a difference.

I'm pretty skeptical of it.

Overall, just kind of hoping to see something neat, see something different.

And I do hear that they have a compostable toilet, so I'm really excited to learn about that.

This is a straw bale house.

This is straw bales right here, stacked up like bricks.

The exterior is straw.

It's just like you would see sitting in a field, all bundled up.

Why on earth would someone build out of straw bales?

Right, right, your first thing in your head is probably well, it's going to burn.

It's probably not very strong.

I know the story of the three pigs, you know, the straw, the twigs and the bricks.

Well, here we got straw.

But the reality is after all the testing, a straw bale works really great in an earthquake situation because they're kind of spongy and they float around with the earthquakes and because they're so dense, it's just like a phone book.

Burning a phone book, there's not much air in there so they don't burn very well.

We've had a couple houses survive pretty massive forest fires.

This particular building would have a one hour, uh, fire rating for the exterior walls, which is better than most residential construction.

So the bales aren't actually taking any of the weight of the building, they're just providing the insulation and the wall surface.

Instead of just studs in the walls that are six inches thick and you're gonna see walls that are basically fourteen to sixteen inches thick.

In the beginning, it seems like a crazy idea, but when you start getting into the building science of it, these are really great insulation so you're looking an R-30, an R-40 wall.

Assembly, twenty tons of plaster in this building.

It's really gonna stay cool in the summer and warm in the winter.

Reducing our building energy use is critical to addressing climate change and also just saving people money.

Is this more expensive?

Ah, that's the thing with straw bale, it can actually be cheaper.

If you do all the work yourself, these bales delivered from southern Colorado probably cost $1200, $1500.

We're going to be plastering today on the inside so we got a bunch of guys in there spraying mud.

Watch your hair, 'cause there's gonna be plaster flying.

It's gonna be a little crazy in there, so.

Alright, let's see it!

GINA: Acoustically, when you go inside, it's really quiet and it kind of gives you this feeling of an old fashioned fort.

You're really protected.

It's really strong.

He's showing us the plaster process.

And so they use like three or four coats of this stuff and they're putting it on the walls.

It's really a neat process.

It's almost like it's an adobe clay that hardens into a cement, solid, airtight, 'nothing's getting through this thing' finish.

And the guys are really quick, they're putting it up on the walls, they're doing a great job.

It looks fantastic.

So that's going right on top of the straw bales.

There's no drywall?

There's no drywall and no anything over the bales so that first layer of plaster gets hand rubbed into the bales and that glues everything together in one continuous surface.

So this will be the final coat?

There's actually one more that goes on over this, the finish coat so that'll add color.

But you're not gonna come in and roll latex?

No, no, no, that would be in the natural building world, that would be a little bit of a faux pas.

There's something about it that just feels solid and it feels earthy.

It's pretty amazing to me, I mean, it's about 80 degrees out and in here, Uh hum.

it feels like a nice cool 69.

Evidently they have these windows that they have to bring in from Europe and they're thick.

BRIAN: They're triple pane windows.

They have three panes of glass and they're about twice the thickness of a North American window.

This is three times the insulating value and lets in twice the amount of energy.

Why aren't we making this in North America?

We've had cheap fuel for a long time in America, whereas in Europe, they've really moved towards this out of necessity because utility costs are higher.

We'll get to that point where energy's gonna cost enough where people are gonna have to put this stuff in their homes.

Evidently they've got this composting toilet here on the property and you know... Alright, down in the crawlspace here, you excited to see the composting toilet?

GINA: I am.

Yes.

There's a line.

And, I don't know if that's a line that I want to cross, so...

Seems like, uh, pretty big for a toilet.

[laughs] It is.

This is the waste container.

This is going to be underneath the toilet upstairs and it's just gonna come down and go into this.

What's gonna come down?

Everything that goes into the toilet will come into this tank.

After seeing how it really works, I mean, it's really just a big tank.

It's almost like a septic tank that's not in the ground.

Does it smell?

And it doesn't because we have a constant fan that's exhausting air out of here so it's always negatively pressurized so the air's always going down into the toilet and not back the other way.

I didn't know what to expect, but this actually goes in the crawlspace and it's a big tank that someone else can come out and change once a year.

The showers and sinks and the kitchens and baths, they all go into this conventional plumbing, plastic pipe system and then exit out through the wall here and go to this gray water system that we can go take a look at outside.

RODMAN: I'm gonna tell you something, I really like the idea of a gray water system.

Black water's toilet water.

Your shower water can be in the same... Yeah, when you wash your hands, that's all gray water.

Basically, the plants are going to treat the water.

It's a shallow field.

And it's an experimental system that was approved by Boulder County.

And it takes that water in these infiltrators here and then there's going to be mulch placed around these and the water will just kind of gradually disperse and then also, these aspen trees here will eventually grow into this mulch and suck up some of that moisture too.

And it's going to feed those trees and you can do fruit trees or fruit berry bushes.

I hope that the experiment goes off really well and it's safe and Colorado can accept it as a traditional practice.

I think I'm going to throw this on my list of a definite maybe.

GINA: Never in a million years would I have considered building with straw, but now, after going through it and seeing it, I'm kind of intrigued.

Now we're finished showing Gina and Rodman this straw-built house, figured we show them something kind of on the opposite end of the spectrum, something kind of modern.

Older homes are pretty miserable in terms of efficiency.

Fuel was cheap and we just had no real incentive to make our houses more efficient, so we just built cheap cracker boxes and moved in and life went on.

If we take a really aggressive strategy, something like this house, where every house was renovated to this level, we would actually see a decrease in net energy in the next 50 years.

I think Rodman and Gina are gonna really like this house because it has a modern, contemporary character and feel to it.

I think they're kind of hip and cool and they're going to actually appreciate this one.

We came to Boulder, Colorado today to check out this retrofit house.

I think it was an old '50s, '60s style house, and is now this cool modern house.

This is it!

Wow... GINA: This used to be an old ranch house.

Yes, it was a leaky old, gas guzzling ranch.

Now it's a brand new, zero energy home.

My first impression of the home walking in was just that it was stunning.

You come in, it's trendy, it's modern, it's cool, it's hip.

Top to bottom, complete retrofit, brand new wiring, mechanical, plumbing.

What it was before, it was a classic kind of '50s or '60s brick ranch, brick facade, old aluminum windows that leaked really bad.

You came inside and you had shag carpet and a big brick fireplace and a bunch of tiny rooms that were disconnected and it was definitely an old house.

There's been a bit of debate, are we going start from scratch or are we going to take something that's existing and then retrofit it to be as green as it can be?

I really would rather protect the land and fix up something that has some history and some character to it.

Let's go upstairs and look at the kitchen and look at the views and take a peek.

Okay.

Alright, after you.

We ended up moving the kitchen, living space, dining room, upstairs so you can take advantage of the great mountain views from this particular site up on the mesa.

Wow, this is beautiful!

Look at this kitchen.

I love it.

These views, it's a million dollar view up here for sure.

So, you've upgraded all their appliances.

How important is that?

It's really huge 'cause um, your refrigerator from 1970 is kind of a huge gas hog from an electrical standpoint.

It gonna use a ton of energy whereas a new, you know, a modern refrigerator is going to use much less energy.

You can't have these avocado green refrigerators that are just sucking the life out of the coal plants, you know, you've got to make major changes to these older homes to really have an impact.

This is an induction cooktop so it's magnetic cooking basically so you've got to use a ferrous metal pan so that's cast iron or high quality stainless steel.

And it uses magnets to heat it.

It only heats the pan, it doesn't heat the surface.

The big thing about this is, we're saving energy.

Absolutely, yeah, we're saving energy 'cause the induction is more efficient than an electric cooktop.

It's pretty fascinating and I think that would be something I'd look into if we couldn't have gas, but I like cooking over a flame.

I love these big windows over here, where you can just really look out.

Does that get hot?

Yeah, it does, and that's part of the heating strategy of this building so these big windows in the wintertime, they're going to bring in the sun and then if you notice, outside, we have a big four or five foot overhang here and that blocks the summer sun so it keeps heat off the glass and keeps it, keeps it nice and cool.

These windows are incredible, beautiful windows.

This is huge.

I don't know, this has got to weigh a ton.

It's 1500 pounds, so.

So literally more than a ton!

These are triple pane European glass house-style windows so some of the best we can buy on the market.

So, the only way to make this thing move is to push this handle down and it lifts the wheels up off the track and now it can roll fairly easily.

You try that, babe.

I want to see you push that thing.

I don't know... [struggles] The whole wall is just open.

How beautiful is this, I mean, you got the flatirons, you got... this is awesome.

It's so neat that you can have a window that is energy efficient, but still allows you to bring nature inside.

So net zero.

the idea is that on an annual basis, you're going to produce as much energy from your renewable energy system as you're using so there's two components with that.

One is, obviously, you got to buy some renewable energy.

This house is a completely electric house and the other half is conservation.

The less you use in general, the less renewable systems you have to buy.

The brains!

Yeah, this is where all the, the magic happens.

We had the gas furnace that ran most of the time in the winter.

Now we have basically, a three ton geothermal heat pump that provides heating and cooling year round.

This is the box that heats the whole house, so...

So this is the geothermal...

This is the geothermal heat pump and I believe this is just going to pump water and fluid into the ground, it's going to pull the heat out, bring it into the house in the winter, and then during the summer time, we're going to take that heat that's in the house and bring that hot air over this coil and dump that heat back into the ground.

I envisioned these huge units that would be recycling all these waters back and forth.

You know, these are units that are no different than your regular furnace.

Using the earth's heat to heat your home, it's brilliant.

Why don't we do that?

That's something I would definitely like to have in my home.

What's neat about on site generation of your own power is just that independence of being able to do it yourself.

It's catching on and a lot of people want to be in control of their own utility bills and their own house and their own comfort.

I love the net zero idea.

It just seems like it's the right thing to do.

Tread lightly on this earth to have, you know, as little impact as possible.

To some degree, this is the greenest form of construction you can do is taking something old that needs to be updated and is currently using a lot of energy and making it a zero energy home, and putting power back on the grid.

What do you think, after seeing this do you think you'd deal with a renovation?

I still am torn on the retrofit and the remodel thing.

We'll see.

It just seems like there's so many variables.

I just would want to make sure before I got into that.

Definitely good to know that it's possible to take an old house and really make it energy efficient and passive and beautiful at the same time.

Okay.

We're going to get out of here before the owners get home.

I think they knew we were here.

I hope that Gina and Rodman see in this house the possibility that you can take an old kind of beater that may be a little sad and tired and turn it into something really beautiful.

We're near Bellvue, Colorado up in the Rocky Mountains.

We were one of the first houses that burned in the Hyde Park fire, burned something like 68,000 acres and about 258 homes.

We grabbed everything we possibly could and hightailed it out of here.

Your stable world, you know, literally up in smoke, blowin' overhead.

To even rebuild, that was a huge decision for us.

If we're going to do this, we're going to do it our way now.

It's not just rebuilding, we're healing.

Well, when I started, most of the neighbors thought I was completely nuts because, after all, I was building a house out of recycled material.

The foundation on the structure was borrowed from a technique that's called 'rammed earth.'

You lay the tires like bricks and you pack dirt in them.

They're free, dirt's free.

So far, we're at about somewhere between 25 and 30 dollars a square foot in build costs.

From a modern building point of view, the house meets all the codes.

It's just there's some new things that are done differently than other people do.

RODMAN: We're in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and today we're looking at earth rammed homes.

It's just expansive beauty all around you.

GINA: The kids have been just roaming around, exploring.

I'm sure they'll see some stuff that they would find interesting.

I can't tell you how long I've waited to see an earth rammed home.

The things we're doing here are culturally pretty different from even standard building techniques.

So we come into the house, he's showing me the foundation which is basically just tires, used, old tires.

The foundation of this place is a technique that's been called rammed earth.

What we do is, you lay the tire down, and you fill it with dirt and you pack the dirt.

Once the tire is full, it's very solid.

Unlike concrete, which we have over here, that will crack, this just bends.

So, from a long term structure point of view, it's very stable, very solid.

It goes from this useless waste product that came off your car to a viable building material.

Between the inside and the insulation is, in the whole structure, somewhere between two and three hundred tons of thermal mass.

In this case, the goal is not R value, it's how much heat will this wall hold without spending any energy?

What surprised me is, how the tires hold so much heat and that they feed that back into the house.

I don't want a bunch of ugly tires in my house.

What, uh, is this the finished product right here?

Okay.

No.

So what happens next is we'll go ahead and fill these cavities and build out the wall and so what you'll see when we're done is basically just a nice stone finished wall.

RODMAN: One of the most amazing things about this house is how natural all the resources are that they're putting into it.

They're taking these burnt trees to make the lumber that's building this house.

If you look up there, you'll see the blue stains... Yeah, so this is the beetle kill?

Right.

We're walking into the back of the house and we see their kids starting to shovel dirt through a sifter, mixing it with some water and straw and putting it on the floor to make the flooring.

MARK: Adobe is made of dirt, water and straw.

It's dirt and water, incredible.

MARK: This is our subfloor.

We put it down over the past couple of days.

The purpose of this is to give us a nice solid surface that's coupled to the thermal mass of the floor.

They're pulling, basically geothermal.

The sun heats the floor up in the winter time and then the earth cools the floor in the summer time.

RODMAN: And this is probably a technique that's been used forever, I'm assuming?

Thousands of years.

Thousands of years.

One of the most ancient building materials and it's made out of stuff that most people can pick up in the yard.

What's next?

Oh, dirty hands!

So, today, we're volunteering, we're going to help finish the stairwells coming down into the house, we're gonna fill it with dirt.

I'll guarantee you they'll have some experience they probably wouldn't get anyplace else.

Well, this tire right here came off your van.

[laughs] So we're going to show you how to build a house with it.

It's really simple.

We brought out a little bit of cardboard, put cardboard in the bottom so the dirt wouldn't fall out.

Just drop some dirt in the tires, fill the outside of the ring... Then you just shovel dirt into it and you have to pack it really hard.

When this thing's packed, about how heavy are these tires?

What, three hundred pounds?

Oh, so they're not going anywhere?

No.

The short answer is absolutely not.

If you want you can try to pick that one up, which is about half-way full.

Go ahead, babe.

[laughter] We're gonna get Gina and Rodman into the process of actually turning this ugly tire wall into something we can start to look at and the first step is to take some mud and pack it in there because eventually, it's going to come out and just look like a flat space.

Rodman did not seem like he wanted to engage in the hard work.

I thought I'd sit over on the side for a little bit and have myself a beer.

What are you doing over there, Rodman?

I'll be there in a few more sips... We threw some mud at him, he got out of the chair.

Ahhh!

Oh!

[laughs] Alright, alright, I'll help.

That's right, this is good adobe.

We're just trying to fill the cracks.

Just try to fill the crack, right.

All you're doing is playing in the mud.

Taking a big squoosh of mud and throwing it into the wall.

Ahhh!

This is gonna take a few layers.

You got to start at the beginning and slowly work your adobe out until you have a smooth wall.

This is too much fun, man!

You think we could build a house like this?

I'm up for it.

Are you up for it?

Uh...

Most of the labor to build this house has been through volunteers.

I mean last year we had about a hundred volunteers.

They want to learn, okay, because a lot of the folks who come up here want to go off and build their own.

Aaah!

If you build a house that's counter-culture, you're probably going to raise your children a little bit counter-culture, which I tend to enjoy.

Actually putting our hands in the mud and throwing it up against the wall and being part of the building of the house is good for children to just be part of that.

They were part of the process, you know?

They're learning how to build a house.

One of the things that I've been watching is how much time and love Mark and his family puts into this.

I was shocked to hear that he is gonna spend about a hundred thousand dollars to build this house.

That's like 30 bucks a square foot.

In my past life of working in the building construction industry, I always thought that people who did that were kind of... a little looney.

And now, where I'm at in my life, it's not so crazy after all.

I've seen a lot of different construction processes.

When it comes to the earth rammed homes, it's definitely on my list.

MARK: Love to have Gina and Rodman come back after it's finished out, but I'd even like to have them come back before it's finished out so we can get some more work done.

We're back.

Again.

Alright.

Gina and Rodman got out and saw some pretty unique stuff.

You guys have a good time out there?

I did.

We had... our kids had a blast, we loved it.

I mean, it was really cool to actually work with the adobe, you know, the mud and the straw.

I really like the methodology and the different components that were going into the construction.

The straw bale didn't seem as far out as I once thought it was.

Sometimes it's hard to think about doing something completely different.

But we've seen that it can be done, and it can be done really well.

Straw bale might be a good way to go.

The R value's incredible on those things, and I don't think they have nearly the problems that I had built in my head.

So, Brian, after going out there and looking at that home that had been taken down to the foundation, changed my mind a little bit about what can be done.

Right.

At first I was like, no way, raw land, let's go.

But, ready to go, hey, maybe there is something we can do with some existing construction, too.

Now that I've seen a project that has gone through the same process and understand how it's built and how it's done, I think I'm gonna open my mind up to it a little bit more.

I think you've seen a lot of the spectrum.

It's a big decision, so you want to make sure you do it right.

You're gonna live in this for a long time.

Yeah.

It's gonna be stories and memories.

We just need to kind of process what we saw.

Thank you so much for setting all this up for us.

I think Gina and Rodman saw a lot of different houses, a lot of different ways of approaching green building.

Thanks for coming in.

Appreciate it.

Yeah, this has been great.

Really appreciate it very much.

I'm extremely grateful for Brian to take the time to show us a lot of different creative strategies when it comes to building a home.

It's been so fun to explore.

He's inspired us that we can build something that's very environmentally conscious.

I think what I took away from seeing these homes is that you can live in a mainstream home and still be sustainable.

Learning how to make my own urban conversion has me all over the map.

Cars that run on hydrogen gas or veggie oil?

Making things at home that you can just buy at the store?

Chickens, goats, and bees in your backyard?

It all sounded pretty crazy at first, but the more I explore the sustainability movement, the more fun I have.

Come along with me as my family and I figure out what will work in our household.

It's all a part of making our own Urban Conversion.

♪ ♪ ♪ Sustainability is a huge topic.

On urbanconversion.com we cover it all.

We bring you news, how-to, quick tips for going green and much more.

My education may start on the show, but it continues at urbanconversion.com.

Full seasons of Urban Conversion are available on DVD for 20 dollars.

Follow Rodman and Gina as they explore the sustainability movement through unscripted fun with education as the goal.

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