bow-tie
Full time employment: Posting here.
- Joined
- Mar 23, 2004
- Messages
- 688
Hi all,
It's been quite a while since I've been on the site, but I thought of the combined brain trust here when I started noodling the building of a new house.
So here is my story. We're pursuing some property that would require a new crib. I want any house we build to be as efficient as possible. The land lays such that a berm home would be possible, which I think would be perfect from an efficiency standpoint (facing it south to capture as much passive solar heat as possible and the like). I figured living in a ranch home stuck into the side of a hill would help with cooling and heating (to some degree), similar to the premise of geothermal.
That being said, my research on the net has been baffled. I ran across a site proclaiming the awesome-ness of ICF (insulated concrete forms).... then I run across another site saying ICFs are junk (www.thenaturalhome.com) and so on. This is just one example of competing philosophies I have run across. I want to do this right the first time so I'm trying to get educated on the subject. There are so many options from the layout, to the materials, etc. Anyone have any resources they can point me to? Websites? Great books?
Any help would be awesome....
Thanks
It's been quite a while since I've been on the site, but I thought of the combined brain trust here when I started noodling the building of a new house.
So here is my story. We're pursuing some property that would require a new crib. I want any house we build to be as efficient as possible. The land lays such that a berm home would be possible, which I think would be perfect from an efficiency standpoint (facing it south to capture as much passive solar heat as possible and the like). I figured living in a ranch home stuck into the side of a hill would help with cooling and heating (to some degree), similar to the premise of geothermal.
That being said, my research on the net has been baffled. I ran across a site proclaiming the awesome-ness of ICF (insulated concrete forms).... then I run across another site saying ICFs are junk (www.thenaturalhome.com) and so on. This is just one example of competing philosophies I have run across. I want to do this right the first time so I'm trying to get educated on the subject. There are so many options from the layout, to the materials, etc. Anyone have any resources they can point me to? Websites? Great books?
Any help would be awesome....
Thanks