Clay baths with the addition of straw and sawdust are reliable, beautiful and colorful. We suggest that you familiarize yourself with the options for manufacturing baths from environmentally friendly materials with minimal financial investment. Content:
-
Bath from light adobe
- Building materials
- Making light adobe
- Walling
- Heavy adobe bath
-
Bath made of clay and firewood
- Construction Materials
- Construction technology
Our ancestors built baths from adobe - a building material that includes clay, straw, sawdust. There are two types of adobe - light and heavy. Both types are suitable for a bath.
Bath from light adobe
Light adobe is obtained from clay and straw. The characteristic property of the material is its plasticity and softness when wet. It keeps heat well, is easy to make (straw is mixed with liquid clay), but dries for a long time. Saman is distinguished by the low cost of the components from which it is made.
Materials for making light adobe
The strength of the walls of a clay bath depends on the constituents of the building material, so use only high-quality material:
- Clay is usually mined at a construction site when a pit is being dug. Before use, fold the clay into piles, cover with straw and plastic, and leave until spring. During this time, the quality of the material will increase markedly. The clay should be free of stones, debris, foreign objects.
- For adobe, wheat, rye or barley straw is suitable. Fresh straw is recommended. If the straw is from last year, remove the rot and dry it. Chop it with an ax to keep it short.
- For adobe, use clean water, free of acidic salts, harmful impurities and impurities. The best option is fresh water from a well.
- Buy sand for adobe river, coarse-grained, with a grain size of 1 mm. Do not use dusty sand, it is not suitable for adobe. Sift sand and remove foreign matter before use. Sand is often found in clay, so be careful when determining the amount of material you need.
Making light adobe
The solution is mixed using improvised means. You will need a large container, such as a deep trough. Pour the clay into it, fill it with water and mix thoroughly.
Next, add straw (10-15% of the clay volume) and mix the ingredients for a long time. Sawdust or hay can be used instead of straw. It is not recommended to immediately pour straw into a container and then pour water, it will float up and will not mix well.
The final consistency should be similar to plasticine or mortar for laying a brick wall.
Erecting walls from light adobe
The sequence of work in the manufacture of a bath from clay and straw:
- Make a strip foundation. The requirements for it are the same as for the foundation of a wooden or brick bath.
- On the foundation, assemble a frame (formwork) from any wood, which is subsequently filled with adobe. You can use dry driftwood, tree stumps, old boards.
- Make adobe and fill in the formwork. In one pass, the wall is allowed to be raised by 30-40 cm. Perform the work in warm windy weather, with a minimum air humidity.
- After 6-7 days, when the adobe is dry, the next coat can be applied. The structure will be completely dry after 2-3 months.
- To protect the wall from moisture, sheathe the outside with boards or plaster with lime mortar.
- Carefully waterproof the walls of the bathhouse from the inside and sheathe it with clapboard or tiles to protect it from moisture. It is important to make good ventilation of the premises.
- To insulate a bath from sawdust and clay, you can prepare a solution with which the walls of the room are coated from the inside.
Heavy adobe bath
Heavy adobe consists of 80% sand, the rest is clay and straw. Walls from it are not easy to make, but they dry faster than light adobe. To obtain a solution, pour sand and clay into a container, fill it with water and mix everything thoroughly.
To test the quality of adobe, make a ball out of it and throw it on the floor from a height of 1 m. If the size of the ball has not changed, the mixture can be used in construction. The appearance of cracks in the ball means excess sand in the mixture. If the ball is flattened, there is little sand in the adobe.
When erecting walls from heavy adobe, the formwork can be omitted and the walls and other elements of the bath can be sculpted, as from plasticine. Monolithic masonry allows you to make a bath of any shape - oval, round or arbitrary. In the dressing room, furniture, niches, etc. can be fashioned from heavy adobe. In the steam room and the washing room, only walls are built from heavy adobe.
Bath made of clay and firewood
Compared to a bathhouse made of modern materials, buildings made according to old technologies have the following advantages: cheap building materials, high thermal insulation, and an unusual appearance. No special skill is required to build walls, so we can talk about the simplicity of construction. Clay and wood are capable of absorbing and releasing moisture, so you don't need to use wall insulation.
Building materials for a bath from clay and firewood
The walls of the bathhouse can be made of a material called "clay". To prepare it, you will need clay, straw and wood firewood. Often such a bath is done right in the forest.
Features of the choice of building materials for the bath:
- The wood must be of high quality, do not use solid pieces, they can crack. Use chopped wood to build the walls of the bathhouse from wood and clay.
- The best is coniferous wood, aspen.
- It is recommended to use firewood of the same tree species.
- The length of the firewood should be the same, equal to the thickness of the walls (40-60 cm), and the diameter of the workpieces may differ.
Remove the bark from the logs and fold the blanks under the canopy for 1, 5-2 months. During this time, the logs will dry out and the walls will not shrink. Treat the wood with an antiseptic before laying. To prepare the solution, use the components in the following proportion: clay - 20% of the volume of firewood, sand - 20% of the volume of firewood, straw - 10-15% of the volume of clay and sand. Sawdust or hay can be used instead of straw. This composition prevents the clay from cracking. Otherwise, the preparation of the solution does not differ from the preparation of light adobe.
The technology of building a bath from clay and firewood
The construction technology of such a bath has not changed for centuries:
- Dig a pit under the bathhouse no more than 1 meter deep.
- Make the base for the bath from rubble stone, which is poured layer by layer with cement or clay mortar.
- Form the walls with wood and mortar. It is possible to make walls in a frameless way, then the walls are at the same time a supporting structure. In this way, you can make a bath of any geometric shape.
- Apply the mortar on top of the foundation.
- Place chocks on the mortar with small gaps.
- Fill the gaps with mortar and align horizontally. You can put the solution only along the edges of the chocks, and fill the voids between them with sawdust or straw. In this way, the thermal insulation of the walls can be increased.
- Outside the wall, you can make a crate of thin strips to level the walls.
- To decorate the walls, glass bottles, glass blocks and other elements are added to the masonry.
- After building the walls, cover them with a roof.
- Allow the building to shrink (no more than 1 year) and finish the walls.
Another option for the construction of walls involves the use of a frame. To do this, a wall frame is built on the foundation, like a half-timbered house, and then the voids are filled with clay and wood. The frame is usually made for a structure with corners. How to build a clay bath - watch the video:
There is no more economical construction of a bathhouse than using clay, straw and firewood as building materials. It also reduces the construction costs of building a clay bath with your own hands. The room turns out to be very comfortable, because clay absorbs negative emotions and relieves nervous tension.
