How to Build a Green House in the Desert

Building a green, sustainable home in the desert offers some challenges but it can be done. The biggest challenges are rain water catchment and keeping the house cool enough during the day and warm enough in the evenings.

Land

Rainwater catchment

Gutters

Solar panels

Windmill

Sand

Clay

Water

Straw

Soil

Recycled cans

Wire

Recycled bottles

Design a small home. The smaller the home, the easier it will be to cool and heat.

Situate your home on a lot, ensuring most windows facing south. Build the back of the home into a berm to create thermal mass. Do not add windows to the back of the home. Thermal mass and southern direction are key components to keep your home cool during the day and warm at night without using other energy sources.

Set up renewable energy such as windmills and solar panels.

Build a rain water catchment tank. Set up your rain gutters so that they collect rainwater from the roof and funnel it directly into your catchment tank in order to maximize the number of gallons you can collect.

Use locally found, natural building materials. In the desert, your best building material is probably cob. Cob is like adobe but you can sculpt it more freely. Cob is made up of sand, clay, soil, straw and water.

Fill in non-weight-bearing walls with recycled materials. You can make "bricks" with soda cans bundled together with wire and covered with the cob mixture. This helps to speed up the building process by taking up space in the cob. You can also put soda or wine bottles into the walls horizontally so that you can see the bottle bottoms and situate them so that light from the outdoors shines through them for an artistic effect.

You probably won't be able to collect enough water in your rainwater catchment system for your entire household. So when pricing your home, consider the cost to either have water trucked in to fill up your catchment or to hook up to the city water utility. If you only get a few inches of rainfall each year, use the catchment water to water your outdoor garden.

Consider setting up planters in front of your south-facing windows and grow your own food indoors. They will love the sunlight and you can enjoy fresh grown produce year round.

When building with cob, it takes a lot of trial and error to get exactly the right proportions of sand, clay, soil, water and straw. Experiment by building a small outdoor oven made of cob to see how it fares over time.

Be sure to allow each layer of cob to fully dry before adding another layer or your walls will slouch under the weight of the next layer.

Cob building is quiet (no mechanical devices needed), close to nature and one of the oldest building methods on the planet. You can create a work of art sculpting your home and it could last a thousand years. But the downside is it takes a long time to build your home, adding one layer at a time, allowing each layer to dry.