What Type Of Underground Home Is For You?

There are several categories of underground homes:

1. Earth-Bermed Homes: These have soil packed against three walls, the earth sloping away from the home.
2. Underground Homes: These homes are usually built on a site cut into the side of a hill. After construction, the space between the house and the hill is backfilled with earth to effectively place the house below or at ground level.These can also be ground-level bermed houses, as above, but with earth on top of the home as well, offering more thermal insulation than earth-berm alone (may or may not have grass roofs).
3. Earthships: Amazing passive solar houses made of both natural and upcycled materials (such as earth-packed tires). The concept was pioneered by architect Michael Reynolds in the 1970s, and it addresses all principal needs within itself:

• • Thermo-solar heating and cooling;
  • Solar and wind electricity;
  • Self-contained sewage treatment;
  • Building with natural and recycled materials;
  • Water harvesting and long-term storage;
  • Some internal food production capability.

Earthships are essentially semi-underground homesteads.

Earthship structures are intended to be “off-grid-ready” homes, with minimal reliance on public utilities and fossil fuels. They are constructed to use available natural resources, especially energy from sun and rain water, and are designed with thermal mass construction and natural cross-ventilation to regulate indoor temperature. The designs are typically uncomplicated and mainly single-story so that practically anyone can build one.

Originally designed for dry deserts, earthships are now scattered all over the world and continue to improve in design and function.

Earthships are built underground with their roofs protruding out of the ground.

The roofs are usually solid (not grass) as they are needed for water harvesting.

The design is like that of a long-distance ship or space craft (that doesn’t move), hence the name.

Inside earthships you will find:

• A greenhouse for growing food and producing oxygen;
• Rainwater harvesting systems;
• Gray water cleaning reclamation systems for reusing water and ultimately irrigating crops with it;
• Sewage treatment facilities in the form of composting or anaerobic septic systems, the residues of which go to feed fruit trees or fruit plants (never food that grows in the ground, like tubers, as they might carry E. coli);
• Passive heating and cooling systems;
• Renewable power generation.