How We POWERING Our Unique Superadobe Dome Home ⚡️

we have a lot of projects going on here on our off-grid desert Homestead many of them focused on earthbag and natural building a couple of months ago we ventured into the world of super Adobe domes and started building a 9t circular Dome Home structure that our oldest daughter adeli claimed as her own after building the structure with an incredible group of Workshop attendees we've spent the last couple of months racing against winter temperatures to get the outside covered adding doors and windows and applying multiple coats of cement based plaster laugh and stucco in the last few videos we installed adorable tiny wood stove waterproof the exterior with elastomeric paint and after getting a little distracted with our legendary goat Barn project are now finally installing electrical and beginning to plaster the inside today we are working on the inside of the Dome getting our Brown coat of plaster on so let's go inside and see what we've been up [Music] to we the and look at the St welcome to the Dome so adeli is way faster at this than I am this is how much she's got done and that's how much I have I don't know I can't get it to stick to the wall we're fighting against gravity because like these bags step in on each other so you're kind of trying to shove it up and get it to lock in in an upward motion it's just a lot lot different than anything we've ever done so practice practice practice and we'll make it [Music] work [Music] for the mix on the Dome because I looked back at all the videos that we've done Earth and plaster and I can't find our ratios and I can't remember so I'm doing even Parts sand our soil and clay and it seems to be a really good mix and we just add enough straw to where it looks right and feels right it's all about the feel really when you're doing something like this the soils are always going to be different your Clay is always going to be different so you just have to know what it feels like and try it and if it doesn't stick to the wall something's wrong fix [Music] it this is three batches so all the dark areas are what we've done today we have quite a bit done and we had done all of this section beforehand several weeks ago so this is exciting this is three batches we're going to keep going but I do need to cut some more wood for our tiny fire because you know we got to keep it going keep it warm in here I will never not think that's hilarious that this is hauling firewood for us they're 4 in Twigs it's awesome and it heats up to 200 Square fet our Dome is only 65 square feet and so this is just [Music] easy [Music] we're back in the dome guys we haven't been in this dome for couple months we ar we're going to talk about it uh Hey so here's the deal we're running electrical lines in here because you guys can't do any more Plastering on the inside until that's done and also a friend is coming this weekend and we want to plaster so we need to get these wires in as quickly as possible and also we have a box from ecoflow you see it we're going to go open it and we're going to use it we're going to hook everything up and test it and I'm really excited about it I know you've been really excited about it's just been sitting in the Solar shed for like a month and they keep emailing me and they're like hey when are you going to make that video I'm like I'm almost there I'm almost done with the the goat Barn just give me a minute so we're here we're here today and we're doing it um we have a bet going though uh oh what's the bet the bet is you asked for a certain step stool uhhuh because you want to I need to get up there and measure that bag and I don't think you're going to be able to get up there it's not that tall if I was to hold the step to up there it would reach so if if I'm standing on the step stool it should work but but measuring if you're wrong you owe me five bucks okay and Dad five books oh me too yeah sweet if you are right then I'll give you five books well if I'm right can I pick instead of $5 what I want that depends entirely on what you want we'll talk about it later okay J bringing it is this the right one not that it says a step stool no it's not not that's a horse stol the tall Step [Music] St it's going to work though I don't think you're going to be tall enough maybe dead I don't know no I can do it do you have the T measure babe oh look who's tall enough you see how I can reach that and measure it yeah but but you don't feel safe I feel perfectly safe so aah um I was wondering if you could do my laundry for a [Music] week does that cost more than $5 though no $5 is easier it okay so what we're going to do is we're going to screw up into this bag and then we're going to mount our lighting fixture up there so that we can run the wires this one's going to be a little trickier um I'm thinking what we'll do is we'll just mount a box right here and then we'll tie this up and we'll just have it plug in but this is not flat so I don't know the best way to do [Music] that I think you're going to want to plaster this in on Taco his the what do we call these cable Staples or you nails they're they're rubber coated un Nails what else are they guys this is an ongoing joke about how like 20 people got all upset because we called fence Staples you Nails which is what they're called at the hardware store like we're just you know it's fine everything's fine jeez people get all bent out of shape about little things like that it's okay bent out of shape like a you know stop being in the shape of you know I feel like we should have a shirt that says you know you know I know we nail staple nail St I just want to take the U nail and I just want to turn it and have it be a cail and an in nail you nail it's a new nail it's a nail with two sides a double nail triple sided okay a what is that that's a staple C [Music] what's going on B I just need another pair of hands that's all ja come here be my other hands hold it tight cuz I'm going to hammer on it why cuz I got to you got to hold it like this I'm not stupid no it's going to go like that I'm not that's fine I want you hammering listen I'm going like this see that little so you want me to hold on a oh my gosh just I don't want to get Hammer see you're not holding it tight enough if you're if you don't have you could put it on the ground and do this right I tried it just been yeah you're not holding it I am holding it here you hold it and I'll oh my gosh I feel like it should be on the ground here I'll get it and why don't you hold it and let Jack Hammer it that's what I said I don't have faith that he's going to be able to do this a you don't think I can turn a gear with a screwdriver and a hammer I have fa which way does it need to go that way I'm sorry I doubted you as you should [Music] be oh my gosh do you want me to hammer it it's such a bad angle you're such a bad angle right here babe that one's not going to hold look I believe it though I believe in my heart all you need is to believe no all you need look [Music] see so today we have some help here because well Jonathan and the boys are in Tucson for the day ad's at work a is watching the Doodles so it's just me but I do have some help coming over in this wheelbarrow I've got equal parts sand and clay for now I'm going to add water to it and then we're going to mix in equal parts straw and that will be our base coat and we're just going to go in that Dome plaster where those wires are make sure everything gets really secure in there and just do as much chinking as we can and then if we have time we can go over the bags with a base coat after the [Music] chinking [Music] Johnson has entered the dome which can only mean one thing it's nerdy time all right what are we doing well here's the deal last time we ran our very few electrical lines this is a very low power simple install here but we want to make sure that when adeli comes in the dome she can turn the lights on and that she can control this little fan and then that she will be able to like plug in her phone pH or her computer and like charge things and nothing high power no air conditioners anything like that but uh yeah so the few things that are going to be built into the wall you've already plastered most of those in but what we want to do today is we want to actually put in the plugs and the switches and the lights and we're going to power this whole thing with an ecoflow River 2 Pro oh oh so we're going to unbox it we're going to hook it all up we're going to see how it works you're going to explain it all to me we're going to test it out and it's going to be lots of fun and then we're going to take it all out and finish Plastering yeah that's my fun part I want to get done with the nerdy stuff so I can get back to the fun stuff yeah but I don't want you to get too far into the process without just just just double checking make sure everything works like it's supposed to all right break first step we need an outlet right here that we can plug this little vent fan into the vent fan is important uh not only for air circulation in an earth bag Dome like this but also because of the fireplace we want to make sure there's a way for air to move and for that vacuum to work properly so this is a reversible electric fan it'll run both ways it has a little remote but in order to do that we got to put in our plug right here so we're just going to wire this in and then we'll work on the other end get that plug on what do you think about that bag I need a proper I've I've reached the point of tools where I need a proper electricians bag problem is what's the problem well most electrician bags are open on the top and we have black W yeah wouldn't do great in the garage I don't think what are you stripping off wires babe wires how much do I hate variable RX a lot but I don't really want to put normal RX in the the walls under the plaster so I have to deal with with this I got really spoiled on the barn when we were running like regular RX through the frame stuff it was so much easier to work [Music] with sometimes when you order weird stuff off Amazon it's not standard apparently this bracket is not standard with the standard outlet box because it's not big enough to screw into it so I'm going to go to the hardware store and see if I can find a bracket we can just replace this and see if we can get this to actually screw into this is why we test it before we plaster it all in right so that light is not going to work the bracket that it came with just it doesn't fit it anything I dried a bunch of stuff Ashley had to go run some errands so she's going to pick up hopefully a new light fixture because I really want to test this and turn the light on and make sure that it works the RX that we already attached and we plastered in it has a an unfinished end here in the corner which is where the EC flow is going to go it's going to be under a bed right I'm not going to go through all the trouble of installing like a circuit breaker box and like energizing the box from the eow eof already has plugs built into it right there's no need for us to do that so what I'm going to do is I'm going to mcgyver it I'm just going to to basically hook up the end of that RX to a plug I'm going to plug this straight into the ecof [Music] flow all right we're waiting on the light fixture so it's finally time to unbox the river 2 Pro from eof FL now they did send this to us to review and as you know we have quite a few different off-grid Solar Power Systems here on our property you can see the big one behind me this one has almost 30 kwatt hours of storage 7200 WTS of solar uh it's got a 5,000 WT AC inverter we just put a 3,000 watt inverter in the goat Barn 5 kwatt hours of storage and it's going to have 3,000 watts of solar on it we have multiple small 12vt pump houses and sheds all over the property and we do have another ecoflow a Delta Max the Delta Max is a lot bigger than this little guy but that's okay because we really did didn't need this to do anything crazy like we mentioned before we have a small LED light have a small AC powered fan uh adeli might be charging her phone or a laptop or a few other digital devices we have that tiny wood stove in there so we're not going to be running any kind of electric heat only time the Dome may have trouble is in the dead of Summer and so we're anxious to kind of try that out and see how it performs but this is not going to run an air conditioner weren't ever really planning on it it didn't really make sense to to build a big system like that for such a small building we've already had really good luck with our Delta Max and we like it we use it all the time for various projects so we were happy to go back to eof flow and try something different so I just had to kind of do the math and decide what size we needed so I ended up going with the river 2 Pro for a couple of reasons this only has 768 wat hours of power so it's not even 1 kilowatt hour but again hardly going to be running anything the main reason I went with the pro version of this is that all of our solar panels that we got from Santan are about 250 watts and thankfully this unit will accept a 250 watt panel most of the smaller ones won't and I could put a smaller panel on it but then I have to go buy something different like I've already got extra Santan solar panels sitting around I'd rather just use that and if I really needed to I mean this thing can put out up to 800 watts of power even 1,600 Watts um with X boost so if I really needed to power something in a pinch could totally do it all right how about I open before I talk about it more what do you say come on baby unboxings are always fun right this guy has just been sitting here way too long not getting used because we've been so busy with all the other projects oh it's adorable look at this look how cute this is this is so much more portable than the Delta Max this is only 17 lb as opposed to about 50 lb for our other one I really like the size of this it's going to go we're going to build a bed for Adel and the dumb it'll go underneath so uh those plugs that we just made are just going to plug straight into the front of this we have two there that we've already made up we're going to do at least one more and run some Outlets into the bed that we build when we do that and then we'll have an extra room if she just needs to plug something random up to it I also really like that it already has a couple of usba a ports and a high power USBC which you know this means you can fast charge your phone you could even charge a laptop with this if you really wanted to so for the Dome this is going to give us plenty of power options for adeli to run whatever she really needs to one other thing I really liked about uh the river 2 Pro is that it actually uses lithium iron phosphate batteries which means it has up to 3,000 Cycles uh as opposed to that the older Delta Max which was a different battery chemistry only had 800 Cycles so this is a lot more stable and it's safer and obviously has a much longer lifespan and I feel like in this case it's going to be getting a lot more daily use out of it so I like the idea that it's got more Cycles on it now let's see what else they included in the Box you have a DC charging cable so if you're in your car and you need to charge it you can put plug it up to your cigarette lighter got your AC charging cable you really need to charge it quickly it'll charge the battery directly that way looks like they also sent a small DC charging cable um nobody uses these anymore but thanks for sending it now the one thing they didn't send which we're going to need is the solar adapter right the only way we plan on charging this thing unless there's some crazy emergency is through a solar panel so if you want to connect it they make a cable that has this special DC charging connection that plugs in the back here and then it just has mc4 connectors on the other side that you plug straight into the solar panel so we're going to be fishing this through the tube in the wall that we already made hooking it up to the solar panel turning this thing on and seeing how it [Music] works okay so first test we have the fan uh that's up there we're going to plug this into the ecoflow hold on there we go now it's already running nice okay let's try off that worked so right now it's pulling the air out let's try pulling it in so it should spin the other way yep nice it's like actually really handy okay so it's just got a high and a low in and out [Music] [Applause] [Music] awesome oh my gosh I don't have the cable either it's in the shed hold on [Music] [Applause] [Music] it's so tiny I know isn't it cute all right here we go inut 70 whole Watts it's late in the day it's cloudy but check this out you ready hold on I hit the off button are you ready I'm trying to impress adeli it's not working there we [Music] go [Music] how's it always get so late I'm trying to do stuff if only we had a light in here well give me a minute this is temporary to just test it the length of we have to cut this cuz it's really [Music] long it's a little dark uh all right we're going to plug this in okay so if we flip the switch the light should come on nope oh crap H did you find the problem yeah I accidentally grabbed a three-way switch and I hooked it up to the wrong side so you're so smart and Tall well we'll see figured it out we'll see in a minute smart and Tall well I know you're [Applause] tall thanks thanks I just can't see anything like why does it always late okay now it should work we did it you did it good job bab thanks babe hey weave light a huge shout out to eof flow for sponsoring this video and sending us this River 2 Pro for adeliz stone they have some incredible deals this month for their members Festival sale that you should definitely check out if you're in the market for a portable power station you can use our affiliate link below or in in the description and save up to $2,796 that's a lot of dollars it is a lot of dollars all right so what are we up to next well it's time to get back to the hyperd of ramh housee [Music] friends oh