[Greenbuilding] basement help

[BirdWalk]

Next house is not on city anything except electric and I want to reduce that
with solar both passive and panel with storage if not adding small wind
collector.

Since the new house is located on the same farm we can take our time to get
it right as the final retirement home.  To wit I want as efficient and
comfortable as possible even at the expense of extra time and money one
would not necessarily put into a house.

I can dig a drainage ditch and tile gravel etc it from the lowest point of
the house to a nearby lower point for run off. We were looking into an earth
tube - for the thermal collection.  If this tube was large enough to crawl
through to a nearby ravine it could be an escape tunnel from a tornado
collapsing the house over the basement. So drainage gravel under the tube
would be easy to add.


Current house seems to have several springs under the basement.  We went
conventional plastic and gravel - gravel around outside wall - tar - to no
avail.

Next house I am locating on a bit of a high spot in hopes ground moisture
will 'flow' away naturally in addition to whatever drainage and barrier we
come up with.

Will research the drainage mat.

Thanks

Lucile


 

-----Original Message-----

<<<<
On the next house I would like a basement - a DRY basement
>>>>

In addition to conventional water proofing (not "damp" proofing) methods, I
recommend installing a drainage mat (like Enkadrain  --  see:
http://www.colbond-usa.com/getpage.html?pgid=106&pgtype=5 ) 

Assuming you are on a community sewer system, and that the house sewer
lateral is lower than the basement floor--I also recommend backfilling the
sewer trench with a healthy section of gravel or washed stone, lined or at
least capped with filter fabric.  I've done this on sites with serious
ground water problems, and had bone dry basements with comfortable living
spaces.  On one site with literally bottomless wet, plastic soil, our
engineer designed a buoyant footing system, with reinforced spread footings
poured over 18" deep trenches backfilled with crushed stone--again a dry
basement, no cracks in the concrete walls, for nearly 20 years. 

-AA