At 7:59 PM -0500 1/4/01, David Honig wrote:
At 05:29 AM 1/4/01 -0500, Ken Brown wrote:
Anyway, surely basements are urban vs. rural? A way of getting more room in a restricted space. Do people build them out in the country?
Tim enlightened us IIRC that they have to do with the frost line... you want to have your lowest slab below it.
Yes, basements are mainly intended to put the foundation below the frost heave line. Failure to do this means that as the ground below the foundation freezes and thaws and freezes and thaws...the foundation moves and cracks and all sorts of bad stuff. (There are approaches being pioneered in Scandinavia to allow suitably-build foundations which don't need basements.) BTW, in places where the frost heave line is so far below the surface as to be unreachable with conventional basements, houses are often elevated above the ground. Permafrost regions in Siberia, for example. In most places a conventional 2-3-meter deep basement is adequate to get below the heave line. As I noted in my reply to Ray Dillinger--which he graciously acknowledged to be correct!--California (and Arizona, and most of Oregon that I saw) rarely have basements. None of the houses I looked at in south Texas had basements, either. (No frost heave.) Sometimes people want them as a way of getting extra space, but this is fairly rare. And in many regions the water table is not far below the surface, so basements are, as they say, "contraindicated." Basements have essentially nothing to do with keeping a house cool in the summer. Though basements and cellars did serve a purpose, besides the frost heave considerations, of being a place to store vegetables ("root cellar") and as a place to retreat to during tornados ("storm cellar"). California's energy problems today are market problems, not caused by lack of basements! --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns