ANN ARBOR, MI - When you're "off the grid," it puts you in tune with the way you use your resources in a different way, according to University of Michigan Stamps Art & Design Associate Professor Joe Trumpey.

That's the lesson Trumpey has been teaching his students over the past couple of years as they've taken part in constructing off-the-grid buildings, primarily consisting of straw bales.

There might not be a better teacher for the project. Trumpey and his family constructed their own 2,200-square-foot, off-the-grid straw bale home near Grass Lake in 2009, producing at least half of their own food by gardening, canning, freezing and raising animals for meat and eggs on the 40-acre Shady Acres farm.

Trumpey's latest building is being constructed by a team of 25 UM students in a Green Building class they expect to complete by the end of the month after breaking ground on May 2.

The building, located next to the UM Campus Farm at Matthaei Botanical Gardens, will provide an informal meeting space for students and faculty in what is UM's first off-the-grid building in Ann Arbor. Last spring, Trumpey and his class built a similar straw bale building at the UM Biological Station in northern Michigan.

"The key concept here is to use as many natural, local materials as possible that provides a super-insulated building," Trumpey said. "Being able to use the sun for light and heat as much as possible and minimizing your carbon footprint is the background behind the design principle of it."

Being off-the-grid, Trumpey said, means the electricity used for the building won't be connected to the power grid. The building will have its own independent power supply through a 1.5 kW solar system and eight golf cart batteries. The team will install four solar panels situated on the south-facing roof of the building.

The 600-square-foot building is insulated by straw bales, providing walls that are two feet thick - about two-to-three times the amount of insulation of a normal building with pink fiberglass insulation, Trumpey said.

"It's a super-efficient insulator," he said. "Not only are they thick walls, but they do a thing that's called breaking thermal bridges, so there's no solids that are connecting the inside to the outside, which is minimizing energy moving in and out of the building. So that makes it very efficient."

Along with straw bales serving as insulation, the building is constructed with as little concrete as possible, Trumpey said. The building primarily consists of straw bales and adobe, with an earthen floor inside the building. Some conventional lumber, windows and doors are used, along with a rubble trench foundation.

Students lined the walls with straw bales on Thursday, May 10, before compressing them. A box beam will later be installed on top of the bales, which is connected by rods down into the foundation. Trumpey said the walls will later need to be "weed whacked" before applying three coats of earthen plaster.

The first coat is made of mud and clay earth, followed by a body coat that is a mix of clay, soil, sand and chopped straw. The final coat is a similar mix as the second, but with a lime putty included to help waterproof the building.

"Your enemy here, just like with any other building, is weather," Trumpey said. "Keeping it dry is key to keeping it healthy. That plaster, letting the bales breathe, is really important. It (will have) a big wraparound porch that really protects the bales."

Constructing the building near the UM Campus Farm allows for pairing the building with events hosted by MDining to highlight its farm-to-table efforts with the food coming from the adjacent fields, Campus Farm Manager Jeremy Moghtader said.

"It serves as a living, learning lab for students, so this is a perfect pairing, where we can partner in a way that provides authentic, deep educational opportunities for students to be empowered," he said. "It also provides a very public display of a sustainable building and technologies."

Recent Stamps Art and Design graduate Jack Hyland is once again taking part in the building process on the Campus Farm after being a part of building the first off-the-grid structure last year in Pellston, Michigan.

A team of 25 University of Michigan students are in the process of constructing an off-the-grid building on its Campus Farm, after breaking ground on May 2.

Hyland and a couple of other students who worked on constructing the first building are acting as teaching assistants for Trumpey, guiding new students through the process of efficiently constructing the building.

"We had such a great time the first year. It was a lot of fun in general," Hyland said. "There's nothing more empowering than seeing a house rise from the ground that you built with your own hands. It was kind of the confluence of a lot of my interests with sustainability, design and working with my hands in general."

Jennifer Siciliano, another recent graduate of Stamps who helped build the structure in Pellston, said the project forces students to think about their carbon footprint and consider how they can be more environmentally conscious.

"The (innovation) of living off-the-grid and building naturally and more environmentally-friendly is something that our society needs to be going toward for us to live on this planet as long as possible," she said. "Being able to see, grow, do something hands-on and be a part of that movement is something I was interested in."

For Trumpey, going off-the-grid was a choice of rejecting the carbon associated with the power grid. It made him pay attention to his surrounding environment and made him and his family more accountable for their choices.

"When it's sunny out, you've got lots of power and you can do lots of things," he said. "If it's not been sunny, you have to be responsive and adapt and do less.

"If you're tied to the grid, no one pays attention to that - it never runs out, right?" he added. "When you plug in, you expect that juice to always, always come. That means somewhere is always turning out carbon. If you're off the grid, it puts you in tune to paying attention to your resources in a different sort of way."

The project received funding from the Planet Blue Student Innovation Fund and several UM departments and programs. It was designed by Trumpey with the assistance of UM alum and architect Doug Farr.