Eco-Archi in Malawi

I didn't realize I've waited for so long to post an update. It seems that the roofs have been under the works FOR EVER.  We had wished to get them done by the end of November, before the rains would start.  Well, something like 20 weeks later, now that the rainy season is ending, we still don't have the roof structures covered. Better doing it Necola's way : sit back and wait The contractor hasn't finished placing the designed (by structural engineers) structure, and then the tiles supplier, who is an engineer himself, wasn't happy with the structure at some places and asked the structural engineers to reinforce it. So now, we are in the final stages of putting that */&àçéè' structure up... My fingers are hurting, they've been crossed for too long now ;)   But something is happening ! At the end of the day, it's going to be beautiful and inspiring :)

So, yeah, this week saw the start of the production of our CSEB - Compressed Stabilized Earth Blocks, also called "SSB" for Stabilized Soil bricks, or BTC in French, for Blocs de Terre Comprimée (manque un S pour stabilisée mais bref).  They are much more eco-friendly than the fired bricks (using a looot of wood to get cooked) or concrete (using a loooot of (imported) cement), as these blocks should count only 5% of cement for the stabilization, and don't need any plaster or paint or any other layer on them at the end to be confortable and beautiful. So some soil has already been extracted and sieved, and kinda analyzed ( a bit too roughly unfortunately), we had a bag of cement ready, some water nearby, a large area for the curing was prepared, the machine was assembled and we were ready to start testing ! We made our first blocks on Monday afternoon, guiding the guys for the dry mixing, the wet mixing, the steps for the compression, the handling on the block...

So last week saw another change of plans on site : Tuesday was the last day of the JCB on site, where it only worked for a couple of hours before having to be brought somewhere else, requested by the preparation of the presidential elections... We're getting ready to start making CSEB anyways, I had a closer look to the soil that is being prepared and sent several emails to ask for some advice. We're going to have to go though a test phase anyways, as we're not really sure of the soil we have... it's a good one no doubt, but is it really more sandy / more silty / more clayey ? This is unclear... This is not coffee And the collaboration with the structural engineer is a bit hard as he still didn't really look into what we want to do. Despite all of our discussions, he keeps having in mind that we're using the same type of material that people usually use here, which are hand pressed bricks with 20% cement as a stabilizer... Nope, not the same...