This House Pays Zero Energy Bills FOREVER. Why Is It Banned in Most of America?

Описание: This House Pays Zero Energy Bills FOREVER. Why Is It Banned in Most of America?

This House Pays Zero Energy Bills FOREVER. Why Is It Banned in Most of America?

In 1972, architect Michael Reynolds picked up a used car tire from a garbage dump in Taos, New Mexico — and started a building revolution that got his license revoked. His creation: the Earthship, a fully self-sustaining home built from recycled tires, aluminum cans, and rammed earth that heats and cools itself without a furnace or air conditioner, collects and recycles its own water, grows food year-round in an indoor greenhouse, and runs on a small solar array. The result? Zero energy bills. Forever. Exposed walls thirty inches thick hold 95,000 pounds of thermal mass, keeping interiors at a comfortable temperature even when it's negative eight degrees outside — with nothing running. So why can't you build one? Because Section R316 of the International Residential Code, maintained by a private nonprofit funded by competing material industries, doesn't list recycled tires as an approved building material. Fifty-three years of documented performance data across three continents, and the code has never been updated. This is the story of a house that was banned not because it failed — but because it succeeded. Countries like Belgium, France, Scotland, and Argentina approve Earthships under standard permits. In America, the owner-builder exemption remains the only legal pathway — and 200 to 400 Earthships are still built every year by people who found the crack the code left open.

00:00 – A tire, a dump, and an idea that changed everything
01:39 – The Thumb House: building the first Earthship for $6,000
03:00 – How passive solar geometry heats and cools without any system
03:44 – The water cycle: from roof catchment to four uses per gallon
04:48 – Growing bananas at 7,000 feet in the desert
05:18 – Why an Earthship needs only one-fifth the electricity
06:01 – Zero utility bills — not reduced, eliminated
06:27 – The physics of thermal mass explained
10:22 – How building codes blocked a proven technology
14:50 – Reynolds loses his license and fights back
18:22 – Earthships go global: from Scotland to South Africa
22:32 – The Greater World Community today
23:50 – The owner-builder exemption loophole
25:00 – Why the house that needs nothing threatens everyone who sells something

#Earthship #OffGridLiving #SustainableArchitecture #ZeroEnergyHome #MichaelReynolds