Where We Bought Our Earth Bags
How To Buy Continous Sandbags
The most often question we get, "Where do you buy Earth Bags?" Buying our continuous sand bags was an interesting process and even though we had to jump through a few loops, it was well worth it!! Watch the video for the whole earthbag story and please like and share :D
Shae aka Winter_Apple
July 22, 2016
Transcript of Video
Bree: One our most asked questions is where we get our Continuous Sand bags for our earth bag buildings.
Gary: We looked at steel buildings. We looked at straw bale homes. Log too.
Shelly: Oh, and the green, we were looking at that…
Gary: Green Block
Shelly: Yeah
Gary: Yeah, that was pretty cool. We finally ended up with the idea of sand bag type of material. We bumped into the folks at Superior Sandbag which designed a system that you would scoop up with a loader. You’d scoop up sand/dirt and pour it into a contraption that actually extruded out these long bags. And they would use that for embankments, and use that for retention walls, those kinds of things.
Shelly: Yeah, it looked like really neat system.
Gary: Our first idea was to get an idea of where he got his bags. But, he said, “I've got some. I’ll sell you some.” So that was cool. We managed to pick those up. Cost us around $1100.
Shelly: Yeah, after shipping. And what? Did they bring them up to the exit?
Gary: Yep, brought them right up to the exit in a box truck. We ran up there, picked ‘em up and brought them home. We got Bree’s building done and we got a portion of Garen’s room done, a little bit done over here at the main house and we ran out.
Bree: Shortly after we purchased our bags, we tested it out on a small structure. Later, when we pulled it apart, we had to do it in small sections due to the heaviness and strength of it.
Shelly: This taking it apart, this tiny thing is really difficult. I’ll pull this out. You can see how tough this stuff is. It’s just really, really tough. That’s adobe.
Shelly: We got just a few rows up into Garen’s room and we ran out. And we thought, no big deal. We’ll just get ahold of Superior Sandbag again and we’ll order another roll.
Gary: They weren’t around. Couldn’t find them at all.
Shelly: Probably out of business. We went around and looked. We figured it would be easy to find someone online who was selling them. And there is one company that we all know of that sells them but the price is so high on them. The point of doing these buildings is to be cost effective and not spend a lot of money.
Gary: We had to think about the individual bags. They are sewn up. They’re about 24” long. We were thinking about making a purchase of those. It seemed like a lot more work. Continuous bags seemed to be…
Shelly: Yeah, and we were used to them, we had already done a couple of buildings. We started thinking, well lets keep going back farther and farther. Who produces the bags that companies buy that then breaks them into these bags? And that’s when we, of course, landed on China. They had pictures online and there were these huge rolls, which is what we were looking for.
Gary: It was really cool. It’s like a continuous sock of a poly-weave material that weaves together.
Shelly: We thought, well, what does it hurt, we’ll just go ahead and email someone from this online company and see what kind of things they have and if it’s possible. And, that’s when we bumped into a guy named Denzel Fan and he got on. He saw what we were doing. He knew what we needed them for. He was excited about what we were doing. And, he talked to his boss. They would do as small of order as they could to sell to us. And he comes back and he says, “okay, I can get you 20,000 meters.
Gary: 20,000 METERS. Can you imagine that? I mean you would have to take your shoes off several times to be able to count that up. A meter is almost what? 3 feet. And then you got 20,000. It’s longer than that.
Shelly: It would be, of course, way more than we needed but we thought, okay then what we’ll do is keep what we need and they we will sell the rest. It ended up being 10 rolls at around 2000 meters each. Which interestingly, was about the same size as the original bags we got from California. We would probably need about 3 of those rolls so we would have about 7 to sell. And make up some of the money that we spent on this so that will probably work out pretty good. We had to send 30% of the payment in and it’s not you can do it on paypal or a card.
Gary: We had to go to a wiring service and have the money wired to China. It’s like something you would see in a movie.
Shelly: It was a little bit scary because, sure we had seen the company online and we had been emailing back and forth with Denzel. We didn’t know. Maybe it wasn’t even legit. And maybe we were going to send this 30% into the black hole. So we knew it was a risk. We talked about it and we decided…
Gary: Let’s do it.
Shelly: He contacted us. He said the shipment has hit the dock in California. We want our 70% and thank you very much for your business. And we’re going, we assume they are at the dock.
Gary: In L.A.
Shelly: Yeah, there was a guy on the dock contacting us so we figured they must be there. So, we sent the 70%, the rest of the payment. What we didn’t know, when we purchased them was that there is this whole other process.
Gary: Not knowing much, we had to get some help. We got a broker. A broker to help us get the U.S. side of things - custom things working. It’s not like going down to the grocery store or going online and order something on eBay. No, we had to go through a custom process. We had to go through Homeland Security. That was an interesting process.
Shelly: It’s like Homeland Security, oh my gosh.
Gary: The first thing they needed to do was question us about how we were going to use the bags. What were they for? We explained the process. What we were going to use them for, putting dirt in and so on. They seemed puzzled by that. This was 2013 so tiny homes was not a real big deal. To get this process started, we had some x-rays done and we passed with flying colors and we were able to continue the shipping process.
Shelly: It stayed there for a few days while they had to go back and forth. They have to pass these certain requirements before they allow the shipment to go onto the warehouse.
Gary: We drive up to the city, pick them up and bring them home.
Shelly: The cost ended up being, including all the stuff in California. All that port stuff and what not, they ended up being around $4400 for the 10 rolls. So it ended up being about $440 a roll. And it can easily can do 2 rooms plus a little bit more so we figure a couple hundred dollars for each building. So it’s a good deal. How long did the process take?
Gary: About 3 Months.
Shelly: And once we got them here, we thought it will probably take a year or so for us to sell those other 7 rolls. So we put them out on Craigslist. We had a video that we did on Youtube to let people know if they were interested. I’d say a good 6 months past and we hadn’t heard from anybody. Just seemed like right after that, several people were contacting us and needing them. So we ended up selling the rest of them. The last 5 rolls and we could of sold them over and over again because there have been a lot of people that have wanted earth bags. For some reason, they are still not available. There’s not companies around selling them.
Gary: We might do it again.
Shelly: I think I’d like to try that hyper adobe next.
Gary: Hyperadobe could be fun. It’s a new technology. It wouldn’t require, hopefully, wouldn’t require the barbed wire between bags.
Shelly: Yeah, and our soil is a good soil that would work well with hyper adobe.
Bree: That about wraps up how we got our continuous bags. If you found another company or another way to do it please let us know down in the comments. I know we would like to know as well as others, I’m sure. Anyway, thanks for watching and we’ll see you next week.
Bryson: Next week’s video is going to be about stairs.
Gary: We are going to play Stairway to Heaven.
Shae: Our family moved from the city to the country. Thanks for taking part in our adventure. We have new videos every Friday evening. If you’d like to help us out, you can Like this video, Share it, Subscribe or Support us on Patreon. See the links in the description.
Loading Dock Worker: WAHHHHH! Ugh!
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Resources
www.greenhomebuilding.com/adobe.htm
www.earthbagbuilding.com/articles.htm
www.earthbagplans.wordpress.com
We moved from the city to the country in 2005. Since then, we have been building structures, raising livestock and growing some of our own foods. We are crazy about family, nutrition and want the best for our growing family.
