More half-baked social planning ideas
Tim May
tcmay at got.net
Fri Jan 5 10:57:43 PST 2001
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
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