[Greenbuilding] FW: Hybrid Home

[billc]

At 4:50 PM +0200 4/6/08, Gary Viljoen wrote:
>I'm building a hybrid house of adobe brick and regular baked brick and
>mortar (and timber and recycled glass, etc).
>
>I have two questions:
>
>1. How do I avoid cracks where these 2 materials join? Ie; Is there a
>preferable method of joining them?
>
>2. If I use a cob/lime plaster for the adobe walls, can I use the same
>plaster for the brick and mortar walls?

Hi Gary,

In both cases what will probably do the most good is lots of fiber to 
tie the materials together.  (assuming of course that the cracks 
aren't the result of a poorly done foundation, etc).

Some places where you can probably get more detailed info are the 
Coblist at <http://www.deatech.com/mailman/listinfo/coblist> or in 
the back issues of The Last Straw Journal 
<http://online.thelaststraw.org> (available as PDFs).  There have 
been several issues of TLS over the years specifically dealing with 
earthen plasters.

As far as I know you can use earthen plaster over brick and mortar, 
though it'll need some good keying-in and decent thickness to avoid 
delamination problems.  There's probably something you can coat the 
brick and mortar with to increase the probability of a good bond, but 
off the top of the head I'm not sure what that would be.   Read up on 
it and you'll probably find the answer.

Best of luck.


-- 
Bill Christensen
billc at greenbuilder.com

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