StrawBale Houses

[smwon]

Has anyone tried strawbales houses in Alaska? Wonder how they would work... seems they would be really nice as far as staying warm in the winter and using for animals shelters as well.

[Chuck]

I've never heard of any one building one in Alaska, they would probably work OK. Most of the state is humid so they would need to be sealed some how. Straw and hay bales are pretty expensive up here so I don't know how cost effective they would be.

[Freeholdfarm]

Actually, the Interior is quite dry, and they would work very well there. There are even straw bale homes in the Northeast (as in NY, NH, VT) where it really is humid, and they are doing fine so far. Tok only gets about eleven inches of precipitation per year, and qualifies as semi-desert (in spite of all the little lakes and muskeg on top of permafrost). However, as Chuck said, straw bales and hay are very expensive in Alaska. You would end up with a very warm house, but it wouldn't necessarily be less expensive than conventional construction. But, in Alaska, warm is good!

Kathleen

[smwon]

Kathleen... yes Strawbale houses are used in a lot of states. I wasn't interested just in lowering the cost to build, but to have a very warm energy efficient home... just how much do strawbales go for there anyway?

[Freeholdfarm]

I don't know how much they go for now. There aren't too many farmers up there raising barley anymore, so it might be hard to find locally grown ones at any price. If you could afford to do it, you could have some hauled up the highway -- there used to be, and probably still are, truckers who haul alfalfa hay up the highway from Eastern Oregon (mostly from Christmas Valley, I think). You might be able to get enough straw for a house piggybacking a load of alfalfa. In the late 1980's, when we were last living up there, a ton of alfalfa was running three hundred dollars a ton. Undoubtedly a lot higher now (we were buying local grass hay, not alfalfa!). Actually, you could probably get away with building your house out of local grass hay. There aren't as many bugs and stuff to get into the walls up there. And there is one small house back east somewhere built out of hay that is in excellent condition after close to thirty years, so it should work even better in Alaska. Expect to pay two hundred dollars a ton or more even for grass hay, though (it was $175/ton almost twenty years ago). Size of bales will, of course, depend on the baler, but if you could find someone still making the small 'square' bales that weigh about fifty pounds apiece, you'd get forty of them in a ton, approximately. I'm just doodling here, but you'd need around six tons of bales that size to make a 24' by 36' (outside measurements) house. So, very rough guess, at least $1200 just for the hay bales. If you built Nebraska style, which is probably okay for such a small house, the walls alone would probably cost between $2500 and $3000 (you need stakes, lathe, and plaster, plus tiedowns). That's not including foundation, doors, windows, floor, or roof, but it probably wouldn't be any more expensive than any other method of construction if you did most of it yourself. Keep in mind, though, that the building season up there is quite short.

In return, you would have a really nice R-value, and some mass for heat storage. I've seen nails on the inside of a house get half an inch of frost built up on them, because of the cold being transmitted through the studs in the wall. So even if you built a frame wall, you'd want to build a double wall, with no studs touching both the inside and the outside of the wall.

Where are you, anyway, Linda? We are just outside of Klamath Falls. I saw you mention sagebrush earlier, and wondered.

Kathleen

[smwon]

Thanks for the info kathleen... my property is in the Klamath Falls area as well... ;D I'm in the Medford area at the moment.