Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #378445 in Books
• Published on: 1987-02-19
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 244 pages

Customer Reviews

Great but not for the novice
This is a comprehensive "high end overview" of the things you need to consider if you're going to design and build an underground house. It is not specific to a particular location or house design. As an engineer this book has provided me with a lot of insight into what I need to think about for my house. If you're looking for finished designs and building instructions this is not the book for you. It has been a great introduction for a house I'll be building in the Sierra foothills in the next few years.

Long on concepts; short on formulas
(Rating should be about 2.5 stars)

"Earth Shelter Technology" reads more like a very long abstract than a technical reference itself. There are many (262) references for the 194 pages of text and figures. The book covers the basic ideas of earth sheltering pretty thoroughly, but unless you dig into the references, you're left with very little practical information that you'd need to design an earth-sheltered building.

I thought that I'd hit real meat with a formula for soil temperature as a function of depth underground and day of the year. Plug in mean temperature and annual temperature swing amplitude, and you're almost there. But this formula includes a constant for thermal diffusivity of the soil. Well, there's a table with thermal and other properties of various materials; BUT the authors left some blanks: the thermal properties for rock, heavy dry soil, or concrete -- precisely the materials of interest when constructing an earth-sheltered structure in dry areas -- are missing.

There are also many figures with axes labeled but not dimensioned; you can get a qualitative idea of how things relate, but nothing like a quantitative relationship.

The book is dated (copyright 1987); the references are of course even older, going back to 1949. The book reads as if written a decade earlier, though. The dated impression is partly due to the technology used in the book itself. There are no photographs; instead, there are hand-drawn ink illustrations that surely took quite a long time to produce, but lose much of the detail that a decent photograph would show (example: "Aerial view of the University of Minnesota Bookstore"). Also, the text refers to simulation programs for handheld calculators and for mainframes -- there's nary a mention of a PC.

There are very few alternative books on this subject, so I'd recommend it for a conceptual overview. But you won't find enough information here to design an earth-sheltered building.

It's all here folks.
This is probably the only book that shows you how to engineer a underground house properly from start to finish. A must for anyone interested in underground building. Lots of illustrations, but no photos.