News Release page 6
Bamboo Technologies • Bamboo Living Homes
PO Box 1238, Haiku, HI 96708 • (808) 572-1007 • Contact: Robert Henrikson
www.bambooliving.com • email: bamboo@bambootechnologies.com
| Bamboo houses are custom manufactured at the Bamboo Hardwoods factory in Vietnam. Once an order is placed, houses are usually shipped within 4 months, giving the owner time to arrange permits and the building site. Upon arrival, a house is assembled in 3 -5 days. |
Manufacturing Bamboo Houses in Vietnam
Vietnam has an estimated 200,000 square miles of bamboo forests.
Today, villagers in 29 provinces grow bamboo for domestic and export products. An important bamboo for construction timber is bambusa stenostachya, or "tre gai", a clumping bamboo. Much of the tre gai bamboo comes from villages in Central Vietnam. The tops of tre gai bamboo are used by chopstick factories, and the long, thick bottom poles usually ended up as scrap. Now Bamboo Technologies uses these sturdy, hard poles (10-14' long, 3"-4" diameter) to build houses.
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Sustainably grown and harvested. New bamboo clumps mature enough to grow full size poles in about three years. In one three month spurt bamboo shoots reach full diameter and height, more than 60 feet high. In three years poles mature into dense, hard bamboo. When poles reach peak strength and hardness, villagers in Central Vietnam harvest them. Bamboo clumps will grow new shoots for up to 75 years.
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Bamboo poles are purchased from villages in Central Vietnam in between Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and Hanoi and shipped by truck to the Bamboo Hardwoods House Factory near Saigon. Here, teams of 300 skilled men and women transform raw bamboo poles into beautiful finished bamboo buildings. At the beginning of 2004, the factory added a second large building and doubled the production capacity to about four bamboo houses per month.
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Poles are sorted, straightened, sanded, cleaned and treated. They are graded by length, diameter, strength. Straightened or curved over fire. Pole knobs are chipped off, then sanded. Vacuum pressure treatment facility uses ecologically friendly borate preservatives. Poles are treated with non-toxic, earth friendly, anti-mold fungicide. Finishing coats are water based acrylic with no VOCs. These finished poles then dry before being made into panels.
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Skilled carpenters fabricate building panels and parts. Poles are assembled into house panels for the walls and roof. Cut bamboo strips are laminated together for siding. House floors, walls, ceilings, roof, porch, railings, closets, cabinets, doors, beds and trim are all made from bamboo. Exterior bamboo walls are overlaid with bamboo siding and interior walls have decorative woven bamboo styles. Steel connectors are inserted in structural joints for hurricane and earthquake standards.
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Each house is constructed, then disassembled and shipped. Each house is custom made to order and assembled at the factory following the Quality Control Manual for Engineered Bamboo Homes.These custom made houses can be octagonal, square, rectangular or a combination of shapes, with optional covered porch extension package. Each house is disassembled, panels are given finishing coats, packed into containers and shipped to Hawaii, USA and other countries.
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