Straw Bale and Straw Panel Homes, with Viva Homes Ecoliving

With Sustainable House Day happening here at the ecovillage and across Australia in March, we wanted to focus this episode on one type of sustainable house that we have several of here at the ecovillage: a strawbale-insulated home.



Straw has been used for insulation for all of human history, but that doesn’t mean that a straw-insulated house has to look or feel like it was made using old technology. The guest for this episode has been involved in building dozens of straw-insulated homes, including a number here at the ecovillage.



Sam Vivers is the founder of Viva Homes, and Viva specializes in straw-insulated construction. Viva does both more traditional strawbale construction, and now also builds with their own prefabricated straw-insulated panels that can cut weeks off of the construction time for a sustainable home — and cut a big chunk off the cost as well.



Resources




Your Home (website)



Straw Bale construction Manual by Gernot Minke



Building With Straw by Gernot Minke



Strawbale Home Building from Earth Garden Magazine



The Strawbale House by Bill & Athen Steen



Earthen Floors by Sukita Crimmel




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