[Greenbuilding] Earth-berming an existing home

[RT]

On Thu, 11 Aug 2011 00:37:19 -0400, Leslie Moyer <unschooler at lrec.org>  
wrote:

>  We have a typical 70's era brick ranch home.

> It's built on a masonry block stem wall with a crawl space that is  
> ventilated right now.

Morely;

Something that might be worth considering is filling the crawlspace with  
crushed stone or broken concrete (and such-like)(after  
deconstructing/recycling the wood framed floor of course) and after proper  
compaction and placement of a soil gas barrier, either casting a thin slab  
on top (say 3" thick, but no more than 4") or putting down an earthen  
floor. If the climate is such that an earth-coupled slab would not be  
beneficial, some underslab insulation to de-couple the slab would be a  
good idea.

Insulation only does so far in helping to keep a space cool in summer. The  
additional thermal mass will help a lot.

Just thinking about it some more now, if there aren't any water issues,  
maybe one just partially fills in the crawlspace before casting the new  
floor, thereby increasing the ceiling height of the living space by a  
couple of feet. That extra height helps too, in keeping people cooler by  
virtue of being not as close to the stratified heat near the ceiling.

And if the roof structure is adequate and of a low enough slope, a Green  
Roof would certainly be beneficial in helping to reduce the cooling load.  
(Google "Dr. Karen Liu (or Lui ?) , Institute for Research in Construction  
(IRC) at the National Research Council of Canada, Green Roofs. There  
should be a report that shows the results of a 1 or 2 year long monitoring  
of a conventional roof and a Green Roof side-by-side, showing a comparison  
of the thermal benefits of the Green Roof assembly. IIRC, there was  
something like a 40% (or better?) reduction in heat transfer.

-- 
=== * ===
Rob Tom
Kanata, Ontario, Canada
< A r c h i L o g i c  at  Y a h o o  dot  C A >
(manually winnow the chaff from my edress if you hit REPLY)