flooring?

[Woody]

So... hexayurts don't have floors.

That could get to be a sanitation problem.

Any hacks come to mind?  Local materials, woven grasses?

Woody

[Vinay Gupta]

Floors are bastards. We hates them, we do.

Options: Softiles. Very good, but they break the cooling effect of
having exposed ground (which settles towards 58F ground temperature
the longer it's shaded.)

Concrete: insulated concrete slab, where you have thermal mass..
Plausible, but there's that ground heat thing again. And ground is
often soft, which means foundations...

A tarp.

The ground is really different from locale to locale. Air and rain
and snow are all much the same. Therefloor floors are hard.

All good ideas welcomed on this troubling topic!

Vinay

[ewt]

Webbed mats might be durable and washable? Something a bit like welcome mats made of old flip-flops (will look for link tomorrow, it's waaaaaay past my bedtime...)

ewt

[Richard Ginn]

Dirt floors are traditional in many places, they can be packed hard and be OK, people have lived with them forever, they may not be unsanitary.  Think about how to clean a floor.  Mats accumulate things and are not easily cleaned.

If you want cooling, dirt may be the way.  If you want insulation, use the same material the yurt is made of and cover that with a rug.  Level the floor under the insulating paensl with sand or earth, cover with plastic sheeting, lay down panels, cover with rug, done.  Just don't put furniture legs on it, or else put boards under the legs, etc. so as not to puncture the insulation boards.  Simple and easy.

[Vinay Gupta]

Alas, even feet are enough to crush the insulating panels into dust over time. They're just not designed to handle point loads.

They could, perhaps, be covered with something to spread the load, like an additional layer of plastic, perhaps, but that's getting expensive.

Softiles are really nice if the floor should be insulated. I could live with them. But they're $1 a square foot which is more than the building in many cases!

Vinay

[ewt]

Here are the mats I was talking about:

http://www.wetsand.com/product.asp?prodid=821

Now, obviously, at that price it would be ridiculous, but perhaps something similar could be reverse-engineered? Having a sort of lattice that still allows cooling, but you could put mats or similar over top and then the airspaces become insulation...

Crocheted mats made from waste plastic bags, perhaps? These are durable, fairly lightweight and washable; have to be careful to use the non-biodegradable bags though or they fall apart after a year or so. I can make these for testing; I don't think I could do them on a mass-production scale though. They won't do as well for insulation as the wool carpets and rugs used in traditional yurts, though.

Another possibility using crochet - strips of polar fleece crocheted into mats? This should be warmer than the plaggy bags. I usually buy old, worn fleece tops in second-hand shops to do this. It still works out fairly expensive, but if waste fleece could be bought in bulk then economies of scale might kick in.

I could make up some small samples of the crocheted plastic bags and polar fleece and send them off to 2 or 3 people if my descriptions aren't helping...

ewt

[Woody]

ewtster,

love this direction, I do.  whatever material that's available in or near the camps could be made workable through weaving into some kind of flooring.  this is where we start to see local culture modding the design to meet its particular, nuanced, infinitely-bifurcating, people-specific needs.

Woody

[Vinay Gupta]

Yeah, right now I just don't have any ideas about breakthrough technology for flooring, so I guess we work with whats... er... "on the ground" already :)

Vinay

[Richard Ginn]

Well, there's the Greg Toczko option (building inventor friend of mine), where you use most of the materials you'd use for a house floor, just not any framing/joists/etc: if you have access to sand, plastic sheeting, sub-flooring material (1/4" cheap plywood), maybe insulating boards, carpeting:  you level the ground with sand and cover that with the plastic sheeting, put a layer of insulating boards down with the plywood on top of that (just lay it down tightly touching the piece next to it, maybe use tape if you want to), cover it with carpet if you want to and you have a traditional Western house floor, done cheaply.  It's dry and warm and will support furniture and last a long time.  You could do it with just sand (or even earth smoothed out) and plastic and subflooring.

Richard

[zenoptic]

How about foam floor mats used in kids rooms?

http://www.greatmats.com/products/foamspecial.php

Put them together and trim to fit the hex. Place this atop of a 5 mil
polly floor taped to the sides to seal out the moisture.

[Vinay Gupta]

That will work very well, but it will insulate the floor, which means
that the primary source of cooling in the hexayurt will stop working.
The thermal transfer to the ground, which is cold, sucks the heat out
of the air inside of the yurt making it much more pleasant to be inside.

Good for night-time, though. Perhaps you could roll the tiles out of
the way in the day time.

I also recommend that if you want the yurt to be warm at night, you
cover the tarp floor with a blanket. Keeps things quite cosy!

Vinay

--
Vinay Gupta - Designer, Hexayurt Project - an excellent public domain
refugee shelter system
Gizmo Project VOIP: 775-743-1851 (usually
works!) http://hexayurt.com/
Cell: Iceland (+354) 869-4605
Skype/Gizmo/Gtalk: hexayurt
People with courage and character always seem sinister to the
rest Herman Hesse

[Lord Percival]

Greetings,

Sorry that I'm new to this particular community, but I've been camping
in (mongolian style) ger for many years.

While I don't take advantage of the dirt for cooling (not often on
dirt, when camping, unlike the playa) we often use, for flooring a
tarp (vapor barrier) covered in a ground cloth (canvas, like our walls
and roof) with a variety of rugs or tatami mats over that. One of the
interesting variation that we are going to use this coming year, that
was actually pointed to, from the hexayurt site, is the AstroBarrier
product line from insul.net, covered in laminate (bamboo) flooring.
It's a little trickier to figure out (the ger is actually round, as
opposed to hexagonal, so edges are hard). For cooling, we actually
lift the edge of the canvas wall, and move the covering from the roof
ring. This allows convection to produce a breeze and cool things. I
know at one point there was discussed a roof-hole for the hexayurt
(something about the thickness of tape actually makes it necessary,
but there was talk of a pipe and fan to fill it or something, to give
you positive outward pressure), but I think that for playa purposes,
that would get much too much dust in. I wonder if there is a way to
use some sort of damp filter, or furnace filter for the bottom holes
(which will suck in the dirt-cooled air) and a sealed pipe with a
filter (just to make sure) for the out-movement of the air. That
might even help reduce the tracked-in dust.

Just some thoughts.
Percival