More half-baked social planning ideas

[Tim May]

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 at 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