Low-tech Living in a light-earth house

No fridge, the laundry by hand, and wheelbarrowing composted humanure around are not everyone’s lifestyle cup of tea, but for Wolfgang Hiepe and his wife, Sabine Drueckler-Hiepe, it’s a good lifestyle. Learn why they’ve prioritised resilience and independence over convenience.

Wolfgang and Sabine emigrated from Germany in 1987, full of verve and the pioneering spirit needed to live an intentional low-impact life independent of the grid, in a community of like-minded people.

Eventually they joined a group interested in developing an eco village; one of the projects to come out of this was Earthsong Eco-Neighbourhood, formed by Robin Allison in West Auckland in 1995.

Permaculture Lifestyle

In the 90s Wolf and Sabine lived on a lifestyle block adjoining Rainbow Valley Farm in Matakana north of Auckland where permaculture pioneers Joe Polaischer and Trish Allen lived. The couple both achieved their Permaculture Design Certificates during that time.

In 1997 they bought a five-acre property, which they named Pukahu, in the new Otamatea Eco Village near Kaiwaka. The new village was founded by Reinhold Huber and Lynne Hindle on permaculture principles: ‘Earth care – people care – fair share’. Each household has their own land plus a share in 175 acres of common land and access to a communal orchard.

Laying the foundations

The initial excitement of laying the concrete foundations for their barn and house was tempered fairly quickly by the realisation that they were spending money faster than they could earn it.

They opted to complete and move in to the 34m² accommodation half of the barn and used the other half for storage. Both sides have a mezzanine floor.

Light earth using wood chip

The barn is a light-earth building made from clay and macrocarpa wood chips sourced from a local sawmill. However coating the wood chips proved time-consuming. They were mixed with clay slurry in a builder’s concrete mixer, but the mixture didn’t flow, so it needed to be compacted and packed properly into corners. Finer wood particles had a frustrating tendency to stick to the mixer walls, which had to be scraped clean for each load, but the resulting light earth was fine.

Light earth using scoria

When it came to constructing the house, Wolf and Sabine chose different materials, trying out a clay and scoria mix. Like the barn, the house was double-framed with Lawson’s cypress.

Fortunately, working with scoria was much easier. The concrete mixer combined clay, scoria and water into an even light-earth mix with the consistency of wet concrete. They shovelled it between two sheets of ply on either side of the framing, where it flowed nicely into corners. As each wall dried sufficiently, they moved the ply up.

Plaster inside and out

The walls were clay-plastered inside and out and finished with a coat of gypsum-based plaster, which dried white and hardened. Many natural plastering options they had seen left surfaces vulnerable to chipping and damage. The gypsum-based plaster leaves white on fingertips but sustains knocks reasonably well.

Initially Wolf made his own gypsum-based plaster but the process was time-consuming and extremely messy so they bought a ready-to-mix finishing plaster coat and are happy with the result.

Top to toe

The windows and joinery were manufactured off-site from macrocarpa. The roofing is Colorsteel, and wooden floors are made from Eucalyptus fastigata, which has a warm reddish hue. They chose dark brown coloured concrete flooring for the dining area because they’d seen a number of earthen floors that had sustained damage, particularly from furniture.

Most of the oiling, sanding and cleaning throughout the build fell to the energetic Sabine, who also set up their vegetable gardens during this period and project-managed the build.

With the concrete slab already in place, it took six months to complete the house and in August 2003 they moved in. The house cost approximately $240,000, and the total along with the barn and carport was about $350,000.

The benefit of hindsight

There’s not much they’d change, but on a second run they’d incorporate the recommended cool-air duct into the pantry.

“I thought that was overkill,” said Wolf, “but in summer the pantry warms up. We have to open the door to let the heat out. It would have been easy when we were building to install a pipe in a ten-metre trench one metre underground to duct cool air into the pantry, but to retrofit would be major.”

In retrospect, Sabine would move the top of the earthen walls to the outside. “It’s hard to get up there, and the ledges collect a lot of dust.”

A large gap was left at the top of the living room wall for light and airflow into the rooms beyond. The house is warm except for a back room. In hindsight, Wolf would have set up the 40-year-old Danish woodburner they brought out from Germany with a flue exiting horizontally from the back. That could have protruded though the wall into the back room and heated it.

Cooking and chilling

In the kitchen, they cook, bake and heat water with an efficient Stanley stove. A large wood-storage drawer is filled from the outside, and rolls on tracks into the kitchen near the woodstove. If they need extra heat for the step-down lounge and dining area, they light the woodburner.

There is no electric fridge, but they use two 60-litre chilly bins installed inside two purpose-made drawers in the kitchen with a four-litre bottle of frozen water inside each bin. Every morning the bottles are exchanged for fresh ones from the freezer (one of the few mod cons they have).

Food from the garden

They don’t need to buy vegetables or fruit. They grow tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, kale, broccoli, apples, pears, bananas, quinces, guavas, persimmons, peaches, feijoas and much more.

Sabine experimented with growing quinoa, amaranth, and oats so they could be self-sufficient for flour as well, but the effort required for the quantity gathered wasn’t worthwhile. She’s very happy with one experiment which produced a good quality cornflour from the traditional Māori multi-purpose white corn, kānga mā.

Power supply

Initially energy was supplied by a smallish photovoltaic system Wolf cobbled together, learning as he went, from second-hand and other bits and pieces. Power was stored in a lead-acid battery bank, which turned out too small.

They could only vacuum in the middle of a sunny day, two computers operated simultaneously were too much, and it was generally inconvenient. The battery bank only lasted seven years.

When they turned the barn into a homestay, power supply became an issue. So two years ago they upgraded the house to a separate robust $24,000 photovoltaic system that utilises a lead-carbon battery bank. They haven’t had to use the petrol-powered generator since, and life is sweeter.

“If you’re looking at power systems,” Wolf says, “buy something big enough that you don’t keep draining the batteries. That’s what wears them out.”

“We use 10% of the power a conventional home uses. Alternative energy systems have basic limitations, and you must find other ways to heat and cool.

“An expensive system big enough to easily accommodate these needs is probably too technologically complex to handle when something goes wrong. Elements wear out too, and by the time you’re getting close to offsetting the cost of your big-enough system, it will be time to replace the batteries or some other expensive maintenance will be necessary.”

Grey water: liquid fertiliser

Pukahu’s grey-water system is a two-tank affair that should be flushed every two months. The top filter tank receives all the grey water from the house, including separated urine. This tank is two-thirds filled with gravel and bark. The water trickles through the layers to the bottom of the tank and flows into the dosing tank.

When the dosing tank is full, it automatically releases 100–150 litres of its contents into a multi-piped soakage system that runs underground through the banana plantation, supplying it with liquid and nutrients.

Dry composting toilet

The couple’s dry composting toilet is a wheelie-bin system (120 litres) set under the toilet seat. They add lawn clippings and sawdust after each use. The bin is accessed through a trapdoor on the large, partially sheltered back porch. Wolf retrieves the bin every month and stores it near their worm farm, which is in an old bath.

When they need a fresh bin, he tips the contents of the oldest one into the bath, which can accommodate two 120-litre loads. The worm farm provides a welcome twelve wheelbarrows of rich compost for the fruit trees every year.

Rainwater is collected in two 25,000-litre tanks, with a pump pushing water up the hill to a third (header) tank of the same size for gravity-fed supply to house and barn. The gardens are watered from the dam.

Eco-style laundering

Outside on the porch there’s a hand washing machine consisting of a horizontal half-cylinder on an axle set into a deep sink.

Once the washing is soaked, (usually overnight) to make the best of this system, Sabine pulls the long sturdy handle set into the axle, submerging the half-cylinder first one way and then the other, perhaps ten times. Later when she’s walking past she gives it another ten pulls, and then ten more before putting the washing through the old manual wringer.

It’s work, but the contraption is ingenious and was inspired by a Lehman’s Catalogue item, and built by a Kaiwaka engineer – lehmans.com/product/lehmans-own-laundry-hand-washer-with-wringer.

A good life

Now retired, the couple work on the property, and Wolf does occasional contract work as a food safety consultant. Sabine is completing studies as a human design analyst, and works in this arena.

Many of the big (and convenient) systems such as electricity have proven to be environmentally unfriendly. Wolf and Sabine live a good life off the grid, with a small low-tech system that’s less likely to collapse, easier to fix, and leaves them in control. It is a balance certainly, but it works for them.

Besides working the property, Wolf still does occasional contract work as a Food Safety Consultant and Sabine is completing studies as a Human Design Analyst, and works in this arena.

https://www.pukahu.co.nz

Nuts and Bolts

Otamatea Eco-Village today: 22 properties + 175 acres common land

Founded: November 1996 (15x 5 acre plots)

Founded on: Permaculture principles – ‘Earth care – People care – Fair share’

Location:  Off Oneriri Road, Kaiwaka, Northland

Number of Residents: 49

Pukahu Construction method: two types light-earth (scoria, and wood chip)

© Theresa Sjoquist

First published in Organic NZ Magazine –