Off-grid house

House: History

How did I come to my current thinking on the design of an off-grid house?

Beginning

I first started thinking about alternative methods of house construction in the 1970s under the influence of a number of sources: in the real world the OPEC oil crises, the Club of Rome reports and so on and, less real, science fiction, particularly by Arthur C. Clark and, to a lesser extent, by Issac Asimov, depicting societies in which telecommunications were in widespread use, replacing much travel, so that people could live wherever they wanted to.

Through-out my career I've been interested in furthering the use of telecomms for these sorts of reasons: at college my central interests were certain aspects of programming language design but a strong subsidiary interest was in networking and when I was at Hewlett-Packard I worked on a number of e-mail projects and a couple of experimental systems designed specifically for multimedia distributed workgroup cooperation.

In the late 1970s or early 1980s I was particularly intrigued by the idea of underground houses. The first such real house I came across was Arthur Quarmby's Underhill on the edge of the Peak District National Park near Huddersfield which was described and shown in an Observer (I think it was) article. Things that appealed about an underground house included:

Though I've now lived on this planet for 52 years I still haven't really adapted to its 24 hour day-night cycle and often get pretty depressed and/or bad tempered when I haven't slept when I need to. Underground housing seems to have the attraction of allowing one to sleep and wake in accordance with one's own body clock without being restricted by natural or artificial temperature swings in the building.

Later

This was all just a vague idea until round about 2000 when I started to get a bit more seriously interested and started looking around on the Web for ideas. I found there's a huge amount going on in a very quiet and decentralized way (good!). What I did find, though, was that there were a lot of different little sub-cultures with good ideas and useful experience but each seemed to be as narrow-mindedly set on their own ways of doing things as the main-stream building industry.

Therefore, I continued to read around both on-line and in books trying to pick up ideas and understand principles but not get too attached to individual "systems" of building. Nevertheless, I did tend to have favourites at various times. The rough sequence was:

Umbrella Houses and PAHS

The first realization was that building underground gives good thermal mass but is actually surprisingly poor from the point of view of insulation, particularly if there is any water in the soil. Water flowing through the soil is even worse as it rapidly carries heat away.

Therefore I took a lot of interest in the ideas of John Hait for umbrella houses and Passive Annual Heat Storage systems (PAHS or PACCS). These are houses which are buried with a waterproof membrane ("umbrella") extending out through the ground to a distance of about 6 metres to keep the soil dry. They store heat in the soil in the summer and release it back into the house in the winter.

However, as I read more I came to realise that the full umbrella house concept was not required (e.g., this house). In particular, Don Stephens' Annualized Geo-Solar designs use the soil beneath a more-conventional house to store heat from the summer for use in the winter.

Earth-bermed and Earthships

escargot, Brighton, SCI, Hockerton, Valencia one

earth-bermed

Straw bale

strawbale

Shipping Containers

containers

Current

Influences

Laren Corie

Who?


Themes

Self-build
Timber Frame
Cellulose
Solar-air sunspaces, indirect gain, low thermal mass
Water for thermal store


References

ESSN
2005-01 pg 9: Elements of Passive Solar **
2005-02 pg 10: Instant Sunspaces **
2005-03 pg 9: It’s Too Cold And Cloudy For Solar ... Not! **
2005-05 pg 9: Overhangs and Oversights
2005-06 pg 12: Keeping Cool
2005-07 pg 24: Staying Cool
2005-08 pg 11: Insulating Your Old House **
2005-09 pg 9: Building a Very Simple Solar Water Heater

Laren Corie

Walter Segal

Walter Segal

Segal method