Building an Underground House

Whether you want to build an underground house to save money on heating and cooling or whether the winds are increasing where you are and you don't want your house to be blown away or whether you just prefer living underground I agree with you living underground is a good idea.

However, one must look at where they live. For example, if you live anywhere on the ring of Fire where earthquakes regularly occur it is very important to make sure you are usuing reinforced concrete as the basis of your underground structure. If you are not now in rainy season one of the easiest ways to accomplish this is to use a bulldozer and or backhoe to dig out the exact area of where you will build your house.

Another important thing to think about is underground water, underground springs or rivers and how to handle that. So, building your underground house like a reverse swimming pool to seal out the water is important if there is a lot of groundwater where you are near the surface of the land.

Another thing to be thinking about is how are you going to get sunlight during the day down into your underground house to solar heat through windows and to provide natural lighting and to reduce your utility bills?

Another idea is to have the roof of the top story of your house above the surface about 5 feet or so. This can be accomplished by building a surface burm of soul pouring a reinforced concrete roof and then growing a lawn as the roof amidst your solar panels if you want to be solar powered too.

One advantage to living underground is that from 2 to 6 or 8 feet underground depending upon the time of year and the place on earth you live the temperature stays a fairly constant 55 degrees to 60 degrees. So this will save you a lot on heating or cooling when the surface temperatures are 50 degrees above this or below this depending upon where you live and the time of year.

Another add on is if you choose to have a 5 foot high roof(your 1st floor could be 3 to 10 feet below the surface of the earth).

Also, many people use large mirrors that follow the sun during the day to funnel solar light and also the heat that it brings down into the home underground. However, both your heating or cooling bills should be extremely reduced by living underground as long as you monitor your utilities daily or weekly.