Customer Reviews

Earth-Sheltered Houses: How to Build an Affordable... (Mother Earth News Wiser Living Series)

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I went to some trouble to survey books centered on both underground or into rock dwellings, and also earth sheltered homes, and this book is the best I could find. It has proven to be everything I had hoped for.

This book deals with earth-sheltered homes, which are homes generally built on the ground, and then covered with natural dirt and growth on the roof only, or on the roof and the berms of earth piled against at least two of the sides after the fact of building.

This is a really excellent offering. 12 chapters, 4 appendices, and an annotated bibliography. A number of really nice color photographs on eight pages in the middle of the book, many black and white photos as well as really excellent understandable diagrams.

Take-aways include the need for extremely careful but not over the top load planning, radon as a factor to take seriously, and ANYONE CAN DO THIS.

The book covers waterproofing, insulation, and drainage, to include waste drainage where gravity rather than pumping is strongly recommended. It does not cover electrical and plumbing installation. It covers energy in relation to sunlight and windows and heat retention curtains, but does not include coverage of skylights (except as an energy loss factor), interior lights and other "plumbing.

The bottom line in the book is that a solid earth-sheltered house can be built for $10K to $20K inclusive of appliances, plumbing and so on, which makes it a lot cheaper and greatly more sustainable than a double-wide trailer home, and better in most respects than your average rambler.

With Peak Oil now upon on, the energy saving features of the earth-sheltered home are not to be taken lightly. The author document going without a need for heat from wood burning for almost an entire winter, and documents getting through any winter with 2-3 cords of wood. The home is cool in the summer without airconditioning, in part because of the natural respiration and evaporation of the earth roof with grass, moss, and wildflowers.

I want to end with praise for the publisher. Five or six times now I have bought boooks based on my interest in their content, only to find that New Society Publishers is the provider. They now rank with Wharton Publishing as one of my favored publishers, and I will be keeping an eye out for anything bearing their imprint.

This is a great book! If you really wanted to build your own earth-sheltered home you could certainly do it using the information presented here (though a wiser course would be to pick up more sources). Thanks to this book and "The New Ecological Home", building our own home with environmentally conscious materials and possibly earth bermed or sheltered is high on our list of priorities. There is only one complaint I have about many books of this variety. They tend to cover difficulties with things like building code and location very lightly.

Building code and location are going to be huge factors in building an earth sheltered structure, especially one made with fewer traditional modern building materials. Difficulties with local regulations or inflexible inspectors/building comissions may prevent you from being able to build in the area you want. This may drive an individual to build in locations further away from urban centers where they might work. Commuting is no fun; and if you wanted to look at it from an environmental standpoint commuting a greater distance to work, grocery market or schools has just raised your carbon footprint and negated some of the savings your earth sheltered home has created.

I would highly recommend that individuals check local code thoroughly and choose a location suitable to their daily needs such as work or other social necessities before building. One need not build out of logs and plaster to have an earth sheltered home, though I understand that the point of this book is to have an affordable home and avoiding expensive modern materials. Take a bigger picture of what you are trying to accomplish; if you are purchasing this book it is somewhat safe to assume you are concerned about the environment. Please also consider materials used. Rob Roy's excellent use of modern materials such as rubber membranes and concrete block are high in initial cost to produce, environmentally speaking, but last longer and provide more benefit to long term savings such as insulative qualities and maintenance costs than lesser materials might. A lot of other earth-sheltered builders advocate natural materials to a fault, they have people using composting toilets and straw-bale homes. While effective in an environmental sense, they are not attractive to the average person. Rob Roy's book moves in a positive direction by using modern materials with environmentally conscious construction to create a home that just about anybody would like to live in.

An excellent reference for those who are interested in Earth Bermed and Earth Sheltered houses. His attention to detail in the excavation and foundation chapters is worth the price of the book alone. Especially when there is a lack of in depth internet resources available for those wishing to build their own earth sheltered house. Although this book deserves the 5 stars for fulfilling its basic promise, I wish he had devoted some time to discussing plumbing for a simple structure. But overall, he gives this reader 90% of the information necessary to start a small sized earth bermed house.

If you are looking to have an earth roof, you will need to purchase his other book "Timber Framing" where he goes into rich detail the structural engineering requirements of load and tension and compression. With these 2 books, you should be able to complete rough plans for a structural engineer to review and stamp with little or none modifications.

Also, for those searching for energy efficient stoves, I recommend aprovecho.org's institutional rocket stove or Ianto Evans Rocket Stove which are both 300% more efficient than traditional wood stoves.

On a conclusionary note. I priced out timber framing members for the roof section of a square 30'x30' roof and it came out to over $9000 in timber alone ( not including the tongue & groove planking). Compare that to a traditional 8/12 pitch roof somewhere in the $3000 price range for rafters, ridge, and plywood. Put a metal roof on that and you should be good for over 30 years atleast. Sure the earth roof is better for the ecosystem and eye but a regular roof allows placement of rainwater collection, solartubes and solar heaters/panels as well. For the cost conscious, I have come to the conclusion that a traditional roof that is superinsulated along with the earth berming techniques in this book will allow people to have their own energy efficient house for less than they think.

This book has great instructions on building an earth sheltered dwelling, but it has a lot of construction specifics. This is a book you would give the company or person who is building your house to make sure they do it right.
I would have liked to see more pictures of different houses to get a real feel of what can be done, structure wise.

Mr. Roy has experience. He's built a few of these earth shelters. And, rather than telling you only how to build them, he gives you reasons why and lessons he's learned from those experiences. With an emphasis on safety, Mr. Roy explains in laymen's terms the in's and out's of earth shelters. I found this an easy and informative read which conjurs up plans and dreams for a earth sheltered house of my own.

Former contractor Rob Roy presents Earth-Sheltered Houses: How To Build An Affordable Underground Home, a thoroughly practical guide to building homes with earthen roofs, for a dwelling in greater harmony with the environment that leaves less of a footprint on the planet. Other benefits of an earth-sheltered home include low maintenance, as well as protection against fire, earthquake, and storm. Modern technology has made strides in solving difficulties that plagued earth-sheltered homes of the past. Earth-Sheltered Houses covers basic design principles; critical concepts to keep in mind when excavating, laying foundation, installing the floor, building external walls, framing timber, and more for earth-sheltered houses; interior considerations; and much more. Black-and-white illustrations and diagrams round out this absolute "must-have" for anyone considering building or owning a sturdy earth-sheltered home.

Rob Roy, Earth-Sheltered Houses (New Society, 2006)

I can't remember the last time I stopped reading everything else I was in the middle of to concentrate on a nonfiction book. I'm not entirely sure that's ever happened before. And the funny thing about it is that I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, this book's target audience; Roy takes a small diversion in Chapter 2 to quote Mike Oehler: "A basement...is an airless place with few windows, artificially lighted and having an artificial feel. An underground house is not this at all." What Oehler is describing is actually exactly what I'm looking for; I never want to see the sun again, if I can help it. Also, the environmentalist stuff goes right over my head; my interest in chasing down this sort of thing is always in the practical money-saving aspects of not having to use temperature control devices (air conditioning an 1100sf house in my area, sparingly, during the summer months can run $300 a month, while heating the same house to sixty-eight degrees constantly during one winter month is well over twice that). Underground housing would seem to be a perfect solution; anyone who's wandered through a natural cave formation (and didn't we all take field trips to them in fifth grade?) knows that temperature underground is much slower to change than it is on the surface. Add on a few other niceties and it's possible to live truly off the grid, and I know many, many people, environmentalists or not, who would be thrilled with such an idea. And there's a lot of practical advice here that even those who don't toe the environmentalist line will want to pick this book up and check out, even if they've never thought about building an earth-sheltered house (or if they're idea of underground living is, like mine, radically different than Roy's), but even that is not the reason I stopped reading everything else to concentrate on this book. That was because it's fascinating.

Roy has built two major earth-sheltered houses, and he takes us through the building of each. (Not separately; in the chapter on foundations, for example, we get both examples.) One is a more "normal" rectilinear house, while the second is a round house, and Roy talks up the advantages of round-house construction throughout the text (though he does warn that you'll run into more problems with the bureaucrats, who aren't used to such things). And, as I said, there's lots of practical advice, but to me, the book's real strong point--especially for those who are just picking it up to read--is that Roy is simply a good storyteller. How-to manuals are not generally known for their readability, but when it comes right down to it, this is a how-to manual, but it's one that will have you saying "just one more chapter". As far as I can tell, that makes it an unique book, and one that's worth your time even if you've never thought about building an earth-sheltered house. Now, can someone find me one about building an underground bunker? ****

Really fascinating read, with great comments by the author. Rob Roy even details the mistakes he made building his own Earth Sheltered Houses. Loads of folks may discount this type of housing, thinking that they won't want to be buried before their time! However, the author shows how even excavating as little as thirty inches depth will typically provide enough soil for berming against the three non-south facing walls (assuming building in the Northern Hemisphere), and six inches to cover the roof. The perhaps less obvious benefits (other than saving up to 80% on energy bills) are the protection offered from extreme weather and even earthquake damage. Plus an Earth Sheltered House will be much quieter than a normal surface dwelling.

Good book to add to your collection, but offers a fairly limited approach to earth-sheltered houses. I suggest you read at least 4 different books from different authors with various approaches and information before deciding on how to design/construct and earth-sheltered house. Make sure you hire an architect/engineer with suitable background to work with you as well (someone or some firm with very solid expertise in subsurface structural design and subsurface drainage - ask for help from your state land grant university and extension service).

I have a growing number of Rob Roy's earh-sheltered construction books and love every one of them. He's lived the experience and was forward-thinking enough at the time to take good notes and photographs that he later converted into well organized and written instructional books. He includes about everything you can think of that you need to know to build one of these structures and good guidance for checking with local ordinances before you begin. Whether or not you've built your home, this is the stuff to dream on and prepare and go on enjoying. Always Excellent!