Paddy said:
Read here about the guy who started it all.
Earth Sheltered Homes by Underground Home builder, Davis Caves Illinois
Bob
Concrete house
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Read here about the guy who started it all.
Earth Sheltered Homes by Underground Home builder, Davis Caves Illinois
Bob
Egon
Epic Contributor
Paddy, I'm thinking of something a little more sophisticated than a plain flat panel. 
What I would be envisioning are designed panels that would incorporate openings for doors and windows. They would be pre invested with all utilities with connections where panels meet etc. These panels need not be flat but could have curvature. There should be a lot of possibilities for a properly designed structure's of this type.
What I would be envisioning are designed panels that would incorporate openings for doors and windows. They would be pre invested with all utilities with connections where panels meet etc. These panels need not be flat but could have curvature. There should be a lot of possibilities for a properly designed structure's of this type.
patrick_g
Elite Member
DocBob, Pilots say, "Mind thy airspeed lest the ground arise and smite thee!" Floors are like that too. Be careful lest your floor arise and smite thee.
Excellent point about the cost of the envelope or the walls. Even if you paid twice as much for a concrete wall the percent increase across the whole project including land, landscaping, site prep and on and on is not THAT BIG.
Regarding the casting of basement walls... I honestly don't know for sure if I would have any problems, given my use of InsulDrain and the redundant French drains if I had not gone monolithic. Concrete typically develops cracks. Rather than trying to prevent all cracking, nearly an impossible feat, I chose to design so that cracks didn't matter. Plenty of rebar holds the concrete together even with lots of cracking, reducing virtually all cracks to minor cosmetic concerns, unless of course you are using a spray or brush-on waterproofing compound and they you have to worry about it failing at the site of a crack.
My monolithic basement walls are 12 inches thick and have a regular pattern of intentional holes through them from the inside to outside. The holes are because we used "SnapTies (SP?)" as part of the forming method. With Insul-Drain, cracks and holes in the wall do not introduce moisture. My fall back plan if too much humidity evaporated off the interior of the basement walls would be to paint the interior with DryLock. There is NO PROBLEM. I not only do not have visible water I have covered sections of floor and wall for a week with vapor barrier and the covered concrete not only didn't get wet it didn't even slightly darken, an indicator of moisture.
Actually, Davis was a fairly early popularizer (in contemporary US) but wasn't close to being first to build, promote, or inhabit an earth sheltered or "underground" home. As I mentioined in an earlier post, among others, the Chinese took to earth sheltered housing early on and in a big way. There are millions of earth sheltered homes in China. They have entire communities of earth sheltered homes and this didn't start recently.
Davis has some good buildable plans and a good reputation. I'm not knocking that ouitfit. Their family did and is doing much to popularize a good thing and they haven't remained static, evolving over time. They have a lot of satisfied customers. They just didn't happen to be a good match for me or so I thought.
Patrick_G
Excellent point about the cost of the envelope or the walls. Even if you paid twice as much for a concrete wall the percent increase across the whole project including land, landscaping, site prep and on and on is not THAT BIG.
Regarding the casting of basement walls... I honestly don't know for sure if I would have any problems, given my use of InsulDrain and the redundant French drains if I had not gone monolithic. Concrete typically develops cracks. Rather than trying to prevent all cracking, nearly an impossible feat, I chose to design so that cracks didn't matter. Plenty of rebar holds the concrete together even with lots of cracking, reducing virtually all cracks to minor cosmetic concerns, unless of course you are using a spray or brush-on waterproofing compound and they you have to worry about it failing at the site of a crack.
My monolithic basement walls are 12 inches thick and have a regular pattern of intentional holes through them from the inside to outside. The holes are because we used "SnapTies (SP?)" as part of the forming method. With Insul-Drain, cracks and holes in the wall do not introduce moisture. My fall back plan if too much humidity evaporated off the interior of the basement walls would be to paint the interior with DryLock. There is NO PROBLEM. I not only do not have visible water I have covered sections of floor and wall for a week with vapor barrier and the covered concrete not only didn't get wet it didn't even slightly darken, an indicator of moisture.
Actually, Davis was a fairly early popularizer (in contemporary US) but wasn't close to being first to build, promote, or inhabit an earth sheltered or "underground" home. As I mentioined in an earlier post, among others, the Chinese took to earth sheltered housing early on and in a big way. There are millions of earth sheltered homes in China. They have entire communities of earth sheltered homes and this didn't start recently.
Davis has some good buildable plans and a good reputation. I'm not knocking that ouitfit. Their family did and is doing much to popularize a good thing and they haven't remained static, evolving over time. They have a lot of satisfied customers. They just didn't happen to be a good match for me or so I thought.
Patrick_G
Egon,
They do have windows/doors and utilities cast in. I have not seen curved though. My main concern is conecting the panels to be water tight. Even if you had full wall panels, you'd still need to address the corners. Another issue I see is the need for a crane to set them. Pour in place just makes more sence to me
They do have windows/doors and utilities cast in. I have not seen curved though. My main concern is conecting the panels to be water tight. Even if you had full wall panels, you'd still need to address the corners. Another issue I see is the need for a crane to set them. Pour in place just makes more sence to me
patrick_g
Elite Member
When I was still thinking out of the box DIY I designed some tongue and groove panels to be poured on site and lifted into place. I also designed a portable errector for stacking the panels. Sinhce at that time I was pretty hard over on DIY (silly me!) I was thinking of 2 ft wide panels. If I had considered heavier duty lifting equipment, say from a rental yard, I could have gone way wideer than a coiuple feet. Lifting eyes were to be cast in and used to lock the corners together by inserting a vertical pin likke a hinge pin. The grooves would be on the top of each panel and the tongue would be aimed downward. My plan was to partially fill the groove with grout and then lower the next panel into place. I didn't expect to have any infiltration.
My simplistic method for attaching the panels with a butt joint and at corners employed half columns on the outside and a cast rectangular "column" to cover the butt joints on the inside of the wall. A 270 degree outer column portion for the outside of an outer corner. This would give a complete cover for the ends of the tongue and groove panels as viewed from outside AND I thought I would like the appearance of columns. I intended to go with octagonal columns (personal taste or lack thereof issue) but round or whatever would have worked. I thought I would have 5 sides of the octagonal column exposed. OK, in reality they would not be octagonal columns but that is what it wouid look like... an octagonal column embedded into the wall with three "facets" burried.
Window and door openings are made by casting appropriate length planks. You don't need more forms just a "dam" to allow casting a shorter plank with one of the standard forms. If a window height does not "fit" well in the 2 ft plank width you can put a "plug" in a plank form and cast a plank with a rectangular "cookie bite" missing to accomodate any height above slab or total window height.
Insulation would have been applied to the inside of the concrete planks. I might have been swayed by $ but the initial idea was to use rigid foam sheets of R-5/inch with alternating layers vertical and horizontal so the seams did not end up in the same place. I too thought 6 inches would git 'er done. (My ICF has 5 inches of foam in total.) My thoughts on plumbing was NO PLUMBING in exterior walls except possibly frost free faucets (hose bibs.) and all electrical in oversized conduit to permit easy retrofit. Weakening of "studs" was not an issue as they are convenient spacers and something to hold sheetrock and were not to bear a heavy load.
Why this approach and not tilt up? Why not monolithic pour? The objective was to reduce: 1. the requirements for expensive equipment to make really heavy lifts, requirements for expensive forms to form the whole thing at once, and the risk of a catastrophic blowout which could have dumped tons and tons of expensive concrete out and I would not have been able to do much about it to recover.
This approach lets you recycle the forms for both inside and outside columns, and panels. Before I came to my senses I had even designed a cement mixer to be built out of a recycled pickup truck with tires and wheels reused as support and drive rolers for the drum. This was not a normal drive around mixer and was not intended to be moved while mixing or pouring but only when empty due to limitations of the frame and bearings. As this approach was considereed early on in my design process before my light came on much more intensly I had not learned as much as I did later and was thinking 2x3 or 2x4 fir out for a conventional drywall finish.
By the time I was getting down to the nitty gritty details of the fir out, and chases for pipes, wires, and air I had decided that I would be hiring a lot more of the work done with a GC and subs so I didn't go this route. It turned out I found a terrific GC who partnered well with me and whose subs were probably the best available in our restricted market. Still it was a learning experience for all concerned as the PanelDeck (think horizontal ICF) was new for the concrete sub but it was too simple to mess up when I was on site to interpret the instructioins. My HVAC guys were tops and hydronics was not new to them. They used a well experienced sub (25+ yrs doing hydronics installations) to do the well field for the geo heatpump.
This DIY approach was to make it possible for a single worker to make reasonable progress working with heavy materials. I expected to hire some helpers and have things go faster. As it turned out I hired oodles of subs and it took 3 years using much more conventiional methods. Oh, this approach could handle a basement but a second story would have been a stretch with homebrew equipment.
Pat
My simplistic method for attaching the panels with a butt joint and at corners employed half columns on the outside and a cast rectangular "column" to cover the butt joints on the inside of the wall. A 270 degree outer column portion for the outside of an outer corner. This would give a complete cover for the ends of the tongue and groove panels as viewed from outside AND I thought I would like the appearance of columns. I intended to go with octagonal columns (personal taste or lack thereof issue) but round or whatever would have worked. I thought I would have 5 sides of the octagonal column exposed. OK, in reality they would not be octagonal columns but that is what it wouid look like... an octagonal column embedded into the wall with three "facets" burried.
Window and door openings are made by casting appropriate length planks. You don't need more forms just a "dam" to allow casting a shorter plank with one of the standard forms. If a window height does not "fit" well in the 2 ft plank width you can put a "plug" in a plank form and cast a plank with a rectangular "cookie bite" missing to accomodate any height above slab or total window height.
Insulation would have been applied to the inside of the concrete planks. I might have been swayed by $ but the initial idea was to use rigid foam sheets of R-5/inch with alternating layers vertical and horizontal so the seams did not end up in the same place. I too thought 6 inches would git 'er done. (My ICF has 5 inches of foam in total.) My thoughts on plumbing was NO PLUMBING in exterior walls except possibly frost free faucets (hose bibs.) and all electrical in oversized conduit to permit easy retrofit. Weakening of "studs" was not an issue as they are convenient spacers and something to hold sheetrock and were not to bear a heavy load.
Why this approach and not tilt up? Why not monolithic pour? The objective was to reduce: 1. the requirements for expensive equipment to make really heavy lifts, requirements for expensive forms to form the whole thing at once, and the risk of a catastrophic blowout which could have dumped tons and tons of expensive concrete out and I would not have been able to do much about it to recover.
This approach lets you recycle the forms for both inside and outside columns, and panels. Before I came to my senses I had even designed a cement mixer to be built out of a recycled pickup truck with tires and wheels reused as support and drive rolers for the drum. This was not a normal drive around mixer and was not intended to be moved while mixing or pouring but only when empty due to limitations of the frame and bearings. As this approach was considereed early on in my design process before my light came on much more intensly I had not learned as much as I did later and was thinking 2x3 or 2x4 fir out for a conventional drywall finish.
By the time I was getting down to the nitty gritty details of the fir out, and chases for pipes, wires, and air I had decided that I would be hiring a lot more of the work done with a GC and subs so I didn't go this route. It turned out I found a terrific GC who partnered well with me and whose subs were probably the best available in our restricted market. Still it was a learning experience for all concerned as the PanelDeck (think horizontal ICF) was new for the concrete sub but it was too simple to mess up when I was on site to interpret the instructioins. My HVAC guys were tops and hydronics was not new to them. They used a well experienced sub (25+ yrs doing hydronics installations) to do the well field for the geo heatpump.
This DIY approach was to make it possible for a single worker to make reasonable progress working with heavy materials. I expected to hire some helpers and have things go faster. As it turned out I hired oodles of subs and it took 3 years using much more conventiional methods. Oh, this approach could handle a basement but a second story would have been a stretch with homebrew equipment.
Pat
Egon
Epic Contributor
Paddy, please, I am not designing these houses built with concrete. There are many much more proficient than I at this type of project.
What I am saying is that a precast concrete house, this also means interior walls should be possible. All utilities would be pre invested as per design.
It may sound difficult but there is many a person out there that could make it look easy. The hardest part would the large amount of investment capital required by the supplier.
What I am saying is that a precast concrete house, this also means interior walls should be possible. All utilities would be pre invested as per design.
It may sound difficult but there is many a person out there that could make it look easy. The hardest part would the large amount of investment capital required by the supplier.