Geodesic Root Cellar: 16ft Sphere, Struts & Hardware Breakdown

In this episode of Occupy the Land, we dive into the engineering behind our new root cellar project on the Arizona desert homestead. With the trench already underway, Ernie walks through the dome calculator on DesertDomes.com to plan a 16ft geodesic sphere (4-phase) that will be buried mostly underground for natural cooling. He breaks down strut lengths in metric, conduit requirements (160 sticks of 3/4″ EMT), hub counts, hardware needs, and how the stamp press will speed up fabrication. The sphere will feature a pond liner, concrete/Air Crete coating, and a ramped access for easy freezer and storage movement—perfect for long-term food preservation away from the desert heat. A detailed, hands-on look at the math and planning that makes this self-sufficiency project possible! Peace.

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Well, we take, one do a full tank of the construction water that we have from the pool, and we’ll go ahead and just put it all in there and let that Carlucci soften up. And day or two, I’ll come back and, like. But, I hope.

Well, we went and did a whole tank, but I saw this. This is cool. What’s this? Oh, yeah. That was a stick. And long time ago. It looks like an ocotillo branch. Oh.

Oh, that was, like, long ago. Well, this is what happens. It’s only been a few minutes, and this is like. They’re like rock, and then they just fall apart. So that’s what we’re doing. Just let it soak, and then it’ll just come up, you know? And I won’t have to fight it, you know, because this stuff is like, like concrete, and it just.

Yeah, just waste time trying to do that. It’s just hard as heck. You’ll see how fast it will do it.

And is it soak in for a little bit. But yeah. See, that’s what we’re doing. So we’ll leave this for a little while and, work on someone Donna’s projects, and I’ll come back and it’ll be a lot easier. How do we do it? Time and pressure. Okay. This is a good opportunity to show the type of soil we’re dealing with here.

Now, this is the Clichy that hardened, like, almost like concrete. I mean, you even heavy equipment doesn’t really do it, but the water seems to be working fine. Now, what I want to do is just show you, you know, just take up some of this and just pick this up and then put it in and just tap it in there.

Now, what you’ll see is it’ll just suck up the water, the moisture and, turn to mud almost immediately unless it’s rock. But I think that is, some of the Clichy. And what happens is this is why we’re doing the ordering of the soil here so we can get it down 4 or 5ft, that it’s like about that deep.

And it reaches that layer and it just sucks it up even more. And what happens is it stores all that water and it doesn’t go anywhere really. I mean, it just stays underground. And you can plant trees so as we want, you’ll see it just starts to turn darker and turns in the mud. And so that’s why we’re doing the auger green and so that this dry soil just sucks that up as opposed to it just running off the land.

So when we do this, it is for every three feet that you have soaked, you get like a foot of water so you can see it just, you know, sucking it up. That’s why we’re doing the check dams and stuff to suck up all this water. Now, it was just a few minutes ago, that I was here, showing you that it was almost done, and now it’s all soaked in.

You know, I don’t want to start pulling it out now, because be, you know, mud, but, just let it soak in a little bit and you’ll see it just all just turns to mud almost right away. That’s why we’re charging the soil. Because we get to save all this water. And you put a tree up here, and it just gets all that water.

You feel me?

So I’m taking care of my neighbor’s ducks. One of them has to work. The other one had to attend a funeral in Utah. So I’ve been feeding their ducks, and they have a bunch of dogs and a bunch of show bunnies. And I have to kind of bribe this mini pincher dog, so he doesn’t bite my legs off.

So here are the show bunnies they have here. Just beautiful. And they’re the softest things you’ll ever want to hold a.

Well, we needed you. Use the water from the pool. So Donna brought the vehicles over, and while it was all out, I got the pressure washer that we have and watch the trail on the tractor. So, you know, the only thing it’s good to wash it, to find out where all the leaks and stuff. Nice and whatever. I got one little zerk on the bucket right there that I got to replace.

So that was good to see that. You don’t want to leave those, but it cleans up pretty good.

And the other side.

And the inside.

So we’re taking care of it.

Now I get to grease it and everything.

Well I get my tractor all cleaned up, and now I get dirty again. Now the for one bucket. This is why this is an important thing. You can open it, grab stuff and whatever. But you can also use this front kind of like a bulldozer. And this to back drag and kind of it’s easy for pulling out these plants and so on and just put it over it and back it up and it cuts it at the root.

But it’s also for, cutting in to the ground. And that’s what I’ve been doing is just dragging this. But we put the water in this yesterday so you can see that. Yeah. It’s a lot softer. It goes down. I’ve been, you know, piling this up. I’ll go ahead and take and front load all this out and go put it over on the, house build and, that makes it a lot easier.

I’m glad my friend Andrew told me about how you can do that, but you can see where the water didn’t hit. It’s still like concrete. You cannot break that stuff up. You know, it just the machinery. Heavy equipment. Unless you got big, giant gold rush excavators or something. You’re just digging through this so you have to wear it.

So I’m going to go ahead and get as much as I can and then we’ll wet this again. I mean, it’s not that big a to only just, you know, have a river going down here, but I’ll make a indentation like, right here to hold the water back and break this stuff up. But I’m about where I don’t need to anymore.

I think this is about where the front door goes. And, this cleats is going to help with that. And I can just use the water to soften up where I need to and not the other. And it’s going to be very stabilized. Now, fortunately, when I bring the backhoe in here, I can just go in the round with it.

And it’s almost a perfect radius, you know, to make it for us. Dropping in the sphere dome. Well, it’s not a dome, it’s a sphere. A dome is like, you know, 5/8 of a of a sphere is how we do that. But if you just keep making all the struts, you make a ball and then we’ll put a door in it.

So imagine a big ball goes in here, and then the bottom will have a flat floor. Because the below the floor is where I want to put a water bladder. And and it’s just mass that will hold the water and, you know, like have a cavity there anyway. Might as well put some water in it. And, so you can see where it’s, moist down there and that is softened up.

So that’s what we’re doing. We’ll go ahead and I’ll get as much soil out of here and try and get as far down as I can, and then we’ll wet where we need to to do that. I mean, if that isn’t a good example, I mean, you know, it just break in like concrete. Paste.

So this is the hole that Ernie is digging for the root cellar right now. It’s probably about ten feet deep. He needs to go another gosh, I think about 5 or 10ft. So it’s quite the project. And because of the Khaleesi, which is like really a petrified dirt, we have to water it and it’ll kind of soften it so Ernie can dig it out.

The tractor just can’t take a bite out of this. So we’re going to water it today, let it soak in. And maybe by later this afternoon or tomorrow he can start digging out this section. But right now it’s like there’s about 10 to 12ft deep and it’s probably about 20ft wide in certain areas, which is what it needs to be.

And, we’ll just keep working on it. We’ll get there.

Okay. I’m going to later do a video on this with clear. But so you understand what we’re doing. You go to Desert domes.com and go to the dome calculator. Or you just put in Desert Dome calculator and it’ll blow up on your search engine. Now, what you do is you put in I do centimeters instead of feet because, you know, .26 of a foot pain.

Yes. So I use metric now a 20ft diameter dome is ten feet radius. So it’s 304.8cm. And then you can’t hit it or you got to hit it. Click the button submit it I figured that out. You hit the button submit I’ve been using this for over a decade and a half now. A four phase dome. How it looks is like this.

If you go to the, dome calculator, boom. You’ll see. All right. One phase. They’re all the same length struts. Two phase. Do you like? Not very strong, really long struts. You do like, you know, dog house or hen house or something. You don’t need a lot of strength. Three phase. You’re starting to get there now. I do a lot of three phases.

You’ll see three phase domes being used for greenhouses, a lot of stuff. Usually they’re 16ft, diameter because a ten foot piece of conduit, you get, maybe three quarters of an inch left over after doing it. Now, a four phase you’re starting to get, you know, strong. That’s what we have for Phase Domes that we’re doing our prototype out here.

And then five, six ones will be Epcot Center. So we’re doing a four phase dome. Now we click on that. And then it was what was it, ten foot is 304.8cm. Submit and you’ll see the sizes. Click in here. So this is from home to home. So when you do the struts they’re like two inches longer than what this is.

Which is five point whatever centimeters. Now this is what you do, all these calculations and I’ll show you this real quick. Go do this better another time. But conduit dome tip. Now this is. We did our first one this way manually. We’ve wedge hammered it. We drill press did. I mean, you could do this, but we got a stamp machine to make this go a lot faster.

You’ll see that because that’s like. Damn, now you’ll see the measurement is from the center of the hole to the center of the hole. Now there’s some trim that you know on there. Now ours, when we do it, it curves it and it rounds out this. It flattens it first and then it punches out the hole and rounds the ends.

You may see on some of the closeups of our dome, but this is why hole to hole you got to add two inches for this trim that it does here. And we do that in centimeters. So you go to Dome calculator for phase 304.8.

I’m telling you you do this in metric. It’s just so much freaking. You see I hit enter it doesn’t work that way. 304.86 MIT then you get the sizes. Now, if you do a dome, you get in half of it. So you have this mini struts this size. If you do a whole sphere, you need of course, more.

Now the connectors, how many connections are there? There’s a total of 162 connections, these hubs. So you need 162 bolts, nuts, washers to put them together. So that’s what I’ve been sitting here working out, figuring out, you know, what I want to do. And, so this is the pirate book. I’ve had this for God over a decade or something.

So this is where I put all my, you see, old calculations and, you know, different plans for different domes. I’ve been doing this a while. So. Sure is the one. I’m doing this one here. Now we’re doing a sphere, not a dome. So it takes, you know, a lot more struts. This is what’s going in for the root cellar.

Now, what you see here is that is the whole the whole. And these 60 A’s B’s 120 C’s. These. That’s how many struts it needs. But you got to add 5.08cm which is like two inches that you add it’s like, you know, 1.5in is a, No, it’s 2.5cm/in with it. So, five centimeters you add.

Now, this is what I have to cut the struts to. Now, I get a ten foot.

EMT conduit, three quarter inch. And what I need to do is figure out I can’t get it as big as I can without wasting a whole bunch. So at 20ft or 609.6cm, you have, 60 of the ten foot. I make two D’s which are 100.44, and then I get left over. 6090 609. So there’s the 60 I need there and 120 there.

Now, an others a lot of times different sizes. You get all kinds of, you know, funky and different, you know, combinations. I can show you other formulas, but basically this is what’s going on. 20 sticks. I can get three of those 80 twos, so I get 60. Do the same thing there. 43 I can get 94.85in, I can get three sticks and that’s what I do.

40 gives me 120, and then 20 of that one will fit on a stick. It’s only this one that I got to get funky a little bit to be able to, not waste a whole bunch. So it comes to 160 sticks. Now these, you buy them in bulk, whatever. It’s about ten bucks. I remember they used to be like $2 and something.

I mean it’s got ridiculous. So 160, I say it would be discount where I’d be like $1,500, $150 in, hardware and, yeah, you go to McMaster car and you just order a bunch of bolts and nuts, and I already have preorders. I know what I need. So this is the actual hardware that I need show for doing this big ass fear root seller is going to cost me, you know, about less than $2,000, and a bunch of hardware and everything.

And depending on how much Portland I use and I got an idea for installation to budget. It’s going to be, I don’t know, maybe $2,500 off that, but it’s going to take time and we’re going to we’re out there. Now that Clichy, I got to, you know, take, you know, the tractor, get it. But what I’ve been doing is taking, Donna’s water station.

She has out the garden and spraying it to kind of soften that up and form it to this size. So that’s what we’re going to be doing. But I had to do this and decide all the equipment that I need in order everything so that I’ll have it ready to start putting together. So that’s what we’re doing. I just wanted to show you that real quick kind of get an idea how we make these domes.

Now, one other thing. When you go to the dome calculator, you go to three phase, which is kind of popular. Then you have there’s different domes. You have like a 3/8 dome, a 5/8 dome, and then the sphere. What that means is to hear here up, that’s a 3/8 dome. And from here you go from the bottom up.

That’s a 5/8 mark all over my screen. But the. Yeah. So that’s a 3/8 or 5/8 dome. You can do that now because this is line that goes across here. You can do that now on the other size domes, you can only do a half, dome or you do the sphere. Now, the reason that’s important is sometimes you don’t want a full dome, you just want a cover, a roof, an area.

And you can just do that with kind of a semitone roof. So we’ve been doing this over the years a lot. So, you know, I’m familiar with it. I know what I need to do. And just sharing with you, you go to Desert domes.com and then you go forward slash dome whatever. And you get to the calculator here and you can have some fun, but you really need that stamp press to make the scratch go faster.

You’ll be make it stretch for the rest of your life.

Geodesic Root Cellar: 16ft Sphere, Struts & Hardware Breakdownhttps://t.co/2E0K6LwJKb

— occupytheland (@occupy_the_land) April 3, 2026