GO UNDERGROUND IN MICHIGAN
(Page 3 of 4)
November/December 1978
By the Mother Earth News editors
Joyce heats her "contemporary cavern" with a single Ashley wood stove ... and — for backup — has electric baseboard heat to keep her guinea pig and parakeet warm when she's away. The wood burner is centrally located on an eight-inch-high brick platform, and its vent and exhaust pipes sneak out on to the roof . . . where they're disguised in hollow tree stumps.
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The house and garage cost us about $44,000 (under $24 per square foot) which is less than the price of a comparable aboveground home in this area. We didn't have any trouble at all obtaining financing, but I have talked with folks who've had problems getting loans . . . usually because they didn't have thorough, well-researched plans to show the officers of their local banks or savings and loan institutions. If you're going to do something "different" you must be able to convince the moneylenders that you know your stuff.
Now, after her first year "underground". Joyce knows the house's capabilities pretty well. She burned 3-2/3 full cords of "cut for free" wood through last year's bitterly cold winter, and only used the auxiliary electric heat when she went away for two weeks in December. Furthermore — with the thermostat set at 70 degrees, and the air outside a chilly 10 above — only 39 kilowatts a day were required to maintain the home's inside temperature. That works out to a heat loss of about 5,400 Btu's per hour for 1,220 square feet of floor space. Before the cold hit, Joyce wondered if the wood stove — with no mechanical means of circulating its heat — would be able to keep the whole house warm. Once winter came along, however, she was pleasantly surprised to find that the interior temperature never varied more than four degrees Fahrenheit from one end of the building to the other. Better than that, though, Joyce discovered that even if she didn't light a fire — when the mercury was huddled like a wad of chewing gum somewhere below zero — the temperature in her earth-sheltered home wouldn't drop more than a single degree every two to three hours.
Even the garage (which is insulated only by the soil around it) stayed high enough above freezing all winter to melt any snow that came in on the car.
Summer brought even more good news: Though the air outside sweltered at around 95 degrees, the house maintained a comfortable inside temperature of 68 to 72 degrees all season!
