"An accurate moisture content reading of straw"

 Katharine Beadle – Post Doc Research Officer, Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering, University of Bath, works on the BaleHaus project.

Building a house with straw

BaleHaus aims at further developing prefabricated straw bales wall panels used in load-bearing low-rise residential buildings.
“The two-storey house we are building during the 2009 summer is part of a research project. The challenge is to use mainly renewable materials, such as wood, straw, and hemp, to reduce carbon dioxide emissions during construction,” said Katharine Beadle. “The BaleHaus is made of prefabricated panels using a ModCell™ system. These consist of a timber frame infilled with straw bales and hemp and rendered with lime.”

Monitoring water content

"We have used the moisture meter Humitest for bales on a number of occasions to provide us with an accurate moisture content reading of straw,” said Katharine Beadle. “This has been necessary and is undertaken before bales are used for ModCell prefabricated straw bales panels, and to ascertain what the moisture content is inside existing panels.”
“The Humitest for bales has been used: before panels were made in our laboratory for structure tests, on straw being used for thermal conductivity tests, on bales used in a panel for a fire test, on bales to used in a set of exposure tests in Cornwall and on the BaleHaus being build at the University of Bale,” she concludes.

Business
Katharine Beadle works on the BaleHaus project in the BRE Centre for Innovative Construction Materials. Researchers at the Centre are developing new ways of using timber and other crop-based materials such as hemp, natural fibre composites and straw bales.