Any Experience In Los With

[jaideeguy]

Have been reading lately about a revival of old fashioned building materials like adobe brick, cob [straw, clay and sand] and can see certain advantages besides being cheap and redily available here. Being up to 2 ft thick, they offer excellent thermal insulation and I am considering covering the south and west facing walls of my 'cement heat sink' of a wall with cob. I do wonder how the humidity would affect cob type walling??

for a better defination of cob.....http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cob_%28building%29

[cloudhopper]

No personal experience but there are quite a few adobe homes up here in Pai if you want to come up and have a look around and talk to the owners. Appears to be very labor and material intensive for the resulting size, and the heavy rains need to be kept off it. Very beautiful and comfortable end product if executed well though IMO.

[jaideeguy]

CH, I had heard about a resort in Pai that was built using cob or adobe. Would you know the name of it? and website?

[cmsoulbrother]

I am pretty sure that cob and adobe offer low insulation (low r values) but high thermal mass. I think that it would exacerbate your "heat sink" problem. I built an earthbag house in Chiang Mai though and although logic would say that a massive building wouldn't make sense outside of a desert climate (with high temperature daily temperature fluctuations, ie. hot days and cold nights) it seemed to work very well, and with a living roof on it, it was quite cool.

Sorry, I realize that sounds a bit contradictory. I would think you might get better results by shading the walls (bamboo?) than by covering them with more massive materials. I think the main reason that my home stayed so cool was that it was almost completely shielded from the sun.

There are some people working with adobe quite a lot near Chiang Mai (at Pun Pun and other places) they are likely the go to people for first hand accounts of how adobe performs thermally in this climate.

[lannarebirth]

Why not take a drive up to Mae Taeng and visit PunPun? Give them a call first, as I believe Jon Jondai is in the states this month:

http://www.punpunthailand.org/natural-building.html

[cloudhopper]

CH, I had heard about a resort in Pai that was built using cob or adobe. Would you know the name of it? and website?

Amy's Earth House

http://www.travelfish.org/accommodation_pr...on/pai/all/3592