The Underground House Book

"The Underground House Book" is typical of its time (1980), prompted by the Persian Gulf oil embargoes of the 1970s. With oil prices skyrocketing finding a way to build houses that would use less energy took on greater priority. In this book author Stu Campbell waxes prophetic, assuming that in a few years most new construction would be earth-sheltered. That of course didn't happen. But the benefits of underground homes still remain even if earth-sheltering doesn't appeal to most prospective home builders. An underground home will be tied into the earth, which a few feet below the surface tends to remain around the average of the air temperature above for the entire year. Thus both heating and cooling loads are greatly reduced. Plus the biggest source of energy loss -- air leaks -- would automatically be plugged by being covered with earth. While waterproofing becomes a much more serious concern at construction time, re-roofing is a non-issue. And finally, a couple feet of soil makes the underground home QUIET. Despite its cheerleader tilt, "The Underground House Book" discusses both the merits and disadvantages of undergound construction with reasonable thoroughness, making reference to the better examples in existence in the U.S. at the time. Appendices discuss in detail such topics as where to place the insulation, how to get a mortgage, and heating costs over the life of the home. The construction techniques are limited to what the builders of the example homes used, so the architectural options presented are incomplete. But overall this is a pretty good single-source book in a field that's sparsely represented. A notable downside is the internal references, such as "(5g)". This just means that *somewhere* in section 5g of the book there's *something* that pertains to what's being discussed in the current section. Many of these connections are tenuous, and I gave up flipping to check the references pretty early on. Summary: Somewhat dated and only moderately comprehensive, this is still quite a good place to start to learn about building an underground, energy-efficient home.