Earthbag Tipi Photo Gallery, Page 2

We ordered a GoBagger. As soon as it arrived we tested it with rice hulls.

It worked great -- just like the movie on the GoBagger website, only rice hulls are much lighter than sand to work with. It works great with earth, too.

This is a standard 14" × 26" sandbag filled with 50 lbs. of dirty sand from a local gravel yard. Dirty sand is a mixture of sand, clay, and small gravel.

Most earthbag building websites recommend 50 lb. grain bags, which are about 18" × 30". For a residential building we would probably use bags at least that big filled with rice hulls for more insulation. For the storage building, insulation is not an issue. We are also testing some limits, so we decided to use the smaller 14" × 26" sandbags. The smaller bags will give us more space inside the building, be much lighter to handle, and use less material.

A 14" × 26" sandbag filled with rice hulls barely registers on the scale.

These bags are overfilled, and ten of them would weigh about 600 lbs. if they were filled with sand. Overfilled with rice hulls, they only weigh about 5 lbs. each.

Overfilled bags are used on double wide courses, such as arch supports, where each course is stacked in the opposite direction than the one below it. To make an overfilled 14" × 26" bag, bounce it on the ground a few times so that the top rounds out like a pail, and fill it to about 6 or 7 inches from the top. Roll the top twice and staple it shut.

With earth, you can do this by weight. With our material, the day we got it it took about 60 lbs. A few days later, it had dried out some and only took about 55 lbs to overfill it. To overfill a 18" × 30" bag takes about 80 lbs. of earth.

An overfilled 14" × 26" stapled bag will tamp down to about 11" × 22" × 4". The dollar bill and the gallon water bottle are shown for size comparison.

Stapling bags is very tedious. For most uses, such as walls, instead of stapling them, simply fill them a little less full and fold the top over.