Скачать или смотреть 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