The Paul Isaacson Family Lives In The House Of The Future
Building an underground house.
March/April 1978
By the Mother Earth News editors
"If you build your house underground—where there's a stable year-round temperature of 55° to 57°F, you're going to save money. Right off, you'll cut your heating and cooling bill by at least 60 to 70 percent. And if you then add a solar heating system to that subterranean dwelling, you'll save even more. Maybe as much as 95, 97, perhaps even 98 percent of an aboveground home's annual heating and air conditioning costs."
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Provo, Utah's Paul Isaacson tends to get animated and excited when he talks about underground houses. And for good reason. Paul, his wife, and seven children now live in the kind of spectacular dwelling that Star Wars' troglodytes would have lived in if they'd only been as smart as the Isaacson family.
Yes, the Isaacsons actually live underground. In a house that's topped with two clear plastic geodesic domes, one inside the other. The larger bubble, which measures 36 feet across, serves as both a greenhouse and a "solar energy trap" heat source for the dwelling buried beneath it. The smaller (12-foot-diameter) dome that is inside the bigger bubble is actually the transparent ceiling or roof of a sunken courtyard or "solaratrium". As such it both [1] separates the aboveground greenhouse from the subterranean living space and [2] serves as a la e skylight for that living area.
The solaratrium directly beneath the smaller dome is the hub of the 50-foot-diameter underground dwelling ... and each of the three bedrooms, a living room, the main bath, and the kitchen open into it. Result: Far from being the dark, closed?in spaces you might have thought, all the major rooms in the 2,000-square-foot Isaacson house are brighter and have a more open and airy feeling to them than their counterparts in most "conventional" aboveground buildings.
ISAACSON STARTED TO BUILD SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT
Paul Isaacson actually set out to construct a far different house from the one he wound up with. He was intrigued by the idea of using solar energy to heat his family's new dwelling during the winter ... but, like most of us, he assumed that the planned home would be a more-or-less conventional above-the-surface stickframe structure.
"The more I looked at the solar homes being built across the country, though, and the more I listened to their architects, engineers, and contractors brag about how they were saving 45 or 50% on heating bills," Paul says, "the more I figured there had to be a better way. And there is. By going underground, we saved?in one fell swoop-more energy than most solar builders can catch with a whole back yard full of flat-plate collectors."
If Isaacson had any doubt that he was on the right track when he decided to put his new residence underground, that doubt was quickly dispelled once the actual construction had begun.
"It didn't take us long to see just how the earth can buffer and smooth out the atmosphere's sometimes harsh temperature swings. There was the time, for instance, when we had the main shell of the house poured with the dirt backfilled over it ... but we didn't have the two domes up yet. This left the solaratrium open to the outside air and it was just a shade above zero outside and snowing at the time. We noticed, though, that as the snow hit the atrium floor-which is 10 feet below the ground's surface-it would melt. So I laid a thermometer down in the puddle of water that was forming, and found that it registered 42°F! Not zero, as it was above the grade ... but 42°. Obviously, we were already getting a nice gift from the earth."
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