New West Series

Off the Grid in Montana, Part 2: Building the Earthship

By Joshua M. Potter, 3-16-11

	Tom and Tara Leonard look at an old Forest Service map he had from working on lumber contracts and surveying. They orient their house to their surroundings before going on a trek from their front door into the Sapphire Mountains or the Bitterroots, all within a short ski from their driveway. Photo by Josh Potter.

Two days after a late January snowstorm, Tom Leonard is in the Earthship on top of the hill in Florence, Montana, preparing beans he harvested from his garden earlier in the season.  He soaks them in a crockpot.

There’s hardly a cloud in the sky. It’s just above freezing. While his wife Tara is at work for the afternoon, Tom says he wants to use the time to realign his solar panels. There’s one large frame with 10 panels on the berm behind his house and another with six more powerful panels on his roof.

Although the solar panels are actually one of the more easily maintained aspects of the Earthship, Tom says that most people are turned away from alternative housing projects like this one because of the necessity of solar power. The upfront cost of the panels and installation can add up to $30,000 or more. And no matter if a house is on the grid or not, it will require pricier, energy efficient appliances if any of the electricity is to come from solar power.

Once the panels were up, though, Tom says all he needs to do is align them to the path of the sun a few times a year. This takes no more than a few turns of a screw.

Of course, it took years to get to this point, he says. It was almost two decades before he was comfortable calling the house done and, still, it’s not finished. He wants to build concrete counters to replace the plywood he has now. And there’s a section of stucco on the exterior that needs patching. But, he says, that’s nothing compared to the process of actually erecting the structure.

“When we started building the house, we said it would be practice,” he says. They planned to use the foundation he began digging in the winter for a barn or greenhouse – anything that Tom could build with Earthship methods before actually building the family’s home. “But after 10 years and it’s still not done, you’re like ‘Maybe we should just make this the real house,’” Tom says.

Tom started building while the family was still holed up in a camper van. He drove up the road, trackless past the first house at the bottom of the hill, every morning to build fires around the grounds to thaw the dirt. With hand shovels and the help of a friend, Tom dug about 15 feet into the ground.

“The only blueprints I had for this house was just for the septic system so (county health officials) could approve what I was doing,” Tom says.

Once the foundation was dug, he began collecting tires from stores happy to give them away rather than pay a fee to dispose of the rubber. He began stacking soda cans on top of the tires, gluing them in place with a mud and concrete mixture he learned to make with a rented cement mixer.

Originally, Tom anticipated it would take a few months to finish the walls. But it took two years just to erect the skeleton of the house and the Leonards moved in before any of the systems for power or water were up and running.

“It was pretty primitive,” Tom says. “There was no solar, no bathroom, no running water. There were a couple of years before we had hot water. But, hot water coming out of a faucet? It was like, ‘Woah!’”

To complicate matters, Tom was pushing his luck simply by building an Earthship so far north. He knew of just one other house like his at a similar latitude, one his friend had started the year before, lower in the valley. Initially, the homes were developed in Taos, New Mexico, by Earthship Biotecture and they became popular in South America where the climate is more conducive to its design.

The windows on the Leonards’ home in Montana had to be set at a greater angle than that of the Earthships south of the equator to catch more sunlight in winter. Tara remembers helping her husband put them into place on a windy day. The expensive 12-foot panes are thick and heavy and dropping them into a frame at a 45-degree angle, she says, should have been a job for a team of builders.

“We trusted that Tom knew what he was doing, that he had put enough research into this,” Tara says. “This was his dream. There’s a certain thing you’ll do to sacrifice for your partner, your mate, when it’s their dream.”

She giggles. “Sometimes I would say it’s my husband’s dream and my nightmare.” She pauses. “But now, I feel like if this were taken away from me, I don’t know what I’d do.”

Maintaining the house is now a labor of love for them both. The garden has to be harvested every fall. The composting toilet churned. The batteries in the power converter and generator need replacing about once a year.

As Tom throws on his coat at the end of January to attend to the solar panels on his roof; the house is now almost uncomfortably warm.

He walks around the grounds with a giant wrench, checking the angle of his solar panels in comparison to the tilt of the earth and it becomes clear that, although he still has to maintain his systems regularly, his Earthship is a success.

He squints into the sun and fixes his hat as he bends under a supportive bar on the back of a solar panel.

“Panels – there’s no maintenance on them,” he says. The irony that he considers solar panels low maintenance as he contorts his body to fit under the frame is lost on him. But, he explains, if they were wind turbines, he’d have to deal with moving parts. As he quickly turns a screw, shifts the panels a few more degrees and looks across the valley at a view most people will never see, words like “maintenance” take on a different meaning.

If these are his chores, he’d take these over anything else, any day. Out here, everything is relative.

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