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Ask HN: Possible to go/live underground to cool off?

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Re: Ask HN: Possible to go/live underground to cool off?

#21
My house is half dug in to a hill; west TN USA. Summer cooling is a bigger concern here than winter heating; and it wins in the summer.

In the winter, it's still a minor win, the half the house with the dug in brick wall wants to be ground temperature (say 60F), which is still higher than air temperature... but its difficult to get it heated up to temps i can live with (72F).

Much thermal mass that has inertia.

Moisture and mold etc are problems even with some extreme measure against direct water incursion. We've got river rock / french drain type gravel between the house wall and actual dirt, on the buried side. That's in addition to some heavy sealant on that side of that wall. Without that, if the dirt came up to the wall; there'd be constant water seepage on the inside of the brick wall. I know, it happened; we dug the dirt back out and refilled with the river rock. fiddly backhoe work that.

in the summer that wall will collect condensation water if we let the house humidity get too high. in the spring and fall when we open windows and don't run the air conditioner that wall can be moist to the touch.

Re: Ask HN: Possible to go/live underground to cool off?

#22
in the northwest region of China, there has been a tradition of building 窑洞(yaodong) since ancient times. The 窑洞 are warm in winter and cool in summer, but this type of architecture depends on geological conditions. The area is located on the Loess Plateau, where the soil is sticky and rainfall is scarce. You can find many photos and videos of cave dwellings online.

Re: Ask HN: Possible to go/live underground to cool off?

#24
post #23

> but if it's a matter of survival What is threatening your survival that you feel you need to live underground?

Heat index in Kansas today was 135F.

> Heat index in Kansas today was 135F

Really? https://twitter.com/NWSWichita/status/1693417230661472301

Re: Ask HN: Possible to go/live underground to cool off?

#25
post #17

I once visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West in the Arizona desert. It was built in the 1930s and pioneered passive energy and cooling technique’s in the desert like you mentioned [1]. While Wrights building techniques do work. There is only so much you can do. For example you don’t see anyone building caves to store wine in the desert. In Europe where you used to see cool weather the majority of the year and a…

> In the desert, the earth itself is hot and if go underground, it will only get hotter. Not the case in practice ... It can get to be 42ºC (108 Fahrenheit) in the Australian town of Coober Pedy — and that's in the shade. With opal mines that look like giant ant hills and a network of underground dwellings where residents live, this is the kind of place where the searing heat warps perspectives, and yet somehow clari…

It could be that “Most dugout homes are excavated into hillsides rather than dug from shafts” from your second article. AFAIK temperature doesn’t get cooler underground. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_gradient

Re: Ask HN: Possible to go/live underground to cool off?

#26
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heat index in Kansas today was 135F.

> Heat index in Kansas today was 135F Really? https://twitter.com/NWSWichita/status/1693417230661472301

They typed "Heat index" not "tempreture".

https://www.weather.gov/ama/heatindex

presumably the humidity was 40%.

Re: Ask HN: Possible to go/live underground to cool off?

#27
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Heat index in Kansas today was 135F Really? https://twitter.com/NWSWichita/status/1693417230661472301

They typed "Heat index " not "tempreture". https://www.weather.gov/ama/heatindex presumably the humidity was 40%.

Yeah I googled “Kansas heat index today” and nowhere could I find anything like 135, so was just wondering whether that wasn’t a typo.

Re: Ask HN: Possible to go/live underground to cool off?

#28
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heat index in Kansas today was 135F.

> Heat index in Kansas today was 135F Really? https://twitter.com/NWSWichita/status/1693417230661472301

134 according to https://twitter.com/NWSTopeka/status/1693346851427438815 (off by one errors etc)

Re: Ask HN: Possible to go/live underground to cool off?

#29
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the desert, the earth itself is hot and if go underground, it will only get hotter. Not the case in practice ... It can get to be 42ºC (108 Fahrenheit) in the Australian town of Coober Pedy — and that's in the shade. With opal mines that look like giant ant hills and a network of underground dwellings where residents live, this is the kind of place where the searing heat warps perspectives, and yet somehow clari…

It could be that “Most dugout homes are excavated into hillsides rather than dug from shafts” from your second article. AFAIK temperature doesn’t get cooler underground. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_gradient

Hi, I'm in actual geophysics .. and you're linking to a phenomenon (quick, read your own link) that occurs over a scale of tens, hundreds, and thousands of kilometers.

Near surface underground is different.

Aquifers and all manner of other things behave differently to your blanket "AFAIK temperature doesn’t get cooler underground" and it's well known in practice that digging down a few stories evens out the tempreture compared to above ground.

This even works as a cheap passive cooling system for data centers:

https://pawsey.org.au/groundwater-cooling-system/

Re: Ask HN: Possible to go/live underground to cool off?

#30
post #8

It's very geology dependent, but they do this in Coober Pedy, a town in Australia where underground building is common for cooling reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coober_Pedy I don't think it's something we will transition to in general "for survival" though. Building regulations should just catch up and enforce appropriate insulation levels and building methods for the given environments.

Also there is zero humidity there. I would imagine that would affect an underground house a lot.

Source on humidity: did a 3 month tour there as a chef - never again.

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