How To Hibernate: Get Off The Grid In An Earthship

Earthship: The Easiest Way To Get Off-Grid

Sign up for the Morning Brief email newsletter to get weekday updates from The Weather Channel and our meteorologists.

This is the ultimate smart house, but not because it’s run by technology. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Michael Reynolds has been perfecting Earthship Biotecture for 55 years, and now he says he has the model just right.

“An Earthship is a building that encounters the phenomena of the planet to provide sustenance for its inhabitants,” Michael Reynolds told weather.com.

In other words, the off-grid design runs entirely off nature and is entirely self-sustaining. It is heated by the sun and kept warm using thermal dynamics. The buildings collect and filter rainwater, have their own sewage treatment systems and have attached greenhouses that are teeming with food all year long.

Reynolds has designed, built and overseen the construction of thousands of these buildings around the globe.

But just because they’re off the grid doesn’t mean they’re barebones. Reynolds rents some of his creations for nightly use, and they have usable bathrooms, gorgeous furnishings, television, refrigeration and more.

The History Of Earthship

Reynolds was inspired after learning about waste, trash buildup and lack of affordable housing back in 1969 after graduating from architecture school. Specifically, an episode of “On The Road” with Walter Cronkite and Charles Kuralt got Reynolds thinking about the need to save trees and reduce the aluminum cans piling up in state parks, on roads and all over.

“So immediately I thought, we want the trees. We don’t want to cut them down,” Reynolds said, “But we are for housing. We don’t want the beer cans. Why don’t we try making housing out of beer cans?”

This led him to create the “can brick,” out of discarded steel and empty beer cans before recycling facilities even existed. Each brick consisted of 10 aluminum cans — four flattened and six unflattened wired together into a block. According to the Earthship Biotecture website, they were used to form a structure onto which concrete walls were later built.

One of the original bricks is now on display at the MOMA. The first home he created using those beer cans is still standing to this day.

Earthship kept evolving over the decades to become more user-friendly and to need minimal maintenance, according to Reynolds, incorporating thermal mass and passive solar for heating, skylights for natural ventilation, greenhouses, sewage treatment systems and much more.

The buildings do not use fossil fuels but are able to keep warm all winter.

“We’ve been all over the world and we have noticed… there’s the same six points that people need whether they are developed countries or undeveloped countries,” Reynolds said. “They need comfortable shelter that doesn’t use fossil fuel. They need electricity. They need water. They need food. They need contained sewage treatment. And everywhere any people live, they need something to do with what we call garbage.”

It has taken Reynolds years to grow his product into something that addresses these human needs while attempting to keep it within the price range of traditional housing. Now, his main model is a two-bedroom, two-bathroom home that is completely off-grid and "accelerates, if not completely replaces, the grocery store,” according to Reynolds.

What Is It Like To Live Or Stay In An Earthship?

“I’ve had people go stay in an Earthship… we have nightly rentals, and they say, 'I couldn’t tell the difference between this and a regular home in terms of what was available,' you know, refrigerator, stove, comfortable shelter, hot water… At first, I was livid when they said that because I spent 55 years trying to make this thing better than conventional housing,” Reynolds said.

But after some time, he realized it was a compliment, because people had everything they were used to.

“It’s more comfortable, and you know, they’re living with plants and bananas and tomatoes … and all the creature comforts,” he said.

Earthships maintain a temperature of about 70 to 75 degrees, even in the dead of winter, using just heat from the sun and thermal mass.

The part of the building that is above ground is covered in big windows that let the sun shine through.

The other three walls of an Earthship are buried beneath the ground and are 6 feet thick, using natural materials such as earth, adobe, sand and cement, which capture and store heat.

Instead of those beer can bricks of the past, Reynolds learned that tires packed with earth were stellar insulation. As the air inside an Earthship cools at night or during a cold day, those walls naturally release their stored heat to warm the home’s rooms.

It sounds like magic, but visitors to Reynolds' rental Earthships and owners alike sing their praises.

“I just got … an email from Montana three days ago from one we did up there,” Reynolds shared. ”They said, ‘We’re appreciating you, Michael,’ and they sent me a picture of a thermometer that read the outside temperature, minus 1 and the inside temperature, 69.”

One visitor on the Atlantis Earthship Airbnb listing in Tres Piedras, New Mexico, stated: “Unforgettable experience. Earthships stayed nice and toasty in the winter. Will come back for summer.”

Sustainable Housing For All

Reynolds has dreams of making sustainable living available to everyone. He uses the acronym “WISH” to describe his goal: Worldwide Independent Sustainable Housing.

He wants to simplify his product enough to make it affordable and desirable to the average home buyer or renter, and he believes his two-bedroom, two-bath homes can get there.

“We need to address this as a product like Henry Ford’s Model T, and get that product out there to people,” Reynolds said. “Some don’t even know they need it. They still want a custom-designed home by an architect … they can’t afford it. They need to buy an off-the-rack independent sustainable home or lease it.”

Most of all, Reynolds wants people to know it’s possible to live in harmony with the planet, and to live in a home that cares for you back.

“You know, every night on the news I hear, ‘12 million people without power. The power lines went down.’ This is our cake. Nobody is without power if they’re living in one of these. Nobody’s without water. Nobody’s without heat … no pipes ever freeze. This house is always there taking care of you, because it’s not linked to the vulnerable utility systems municipalities have put forth.”