More On living like Dwarves

One of the biggest problems with planning to use earth sheltered homes in an area like the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America. 

I was looking into this and discovered that the stone walled, earth sheltered home was a staple building style in Shetland, Orkney, the Faroe Islands and many other northern Scottish and Nordic islands. 

Shetland averages around 40 inches of precipitation per year, whereas Vancouver in the PNW averages just over 60 inches of precipitation per year. Although amount of precipitation is higher, the difference isn't jarring. 

This suggests that such buildings can stay dry by taking measures, such as a raised floor, double walls with aggregate between the inner and outer stone walls to drain leakage, aggregate under the floor from drainage, and an aggregate ditch/moat around buildings to funnel rain away from the interior of structures.

Of course at this point, the objection could be raised that this is a lot of extra work for such a building type. Wouldn't it simply be easier to build something resembling the local long houses? The answer to this is that the advantages of stone walled, earth sheltered buildings are many and worth the work.

For more details, have a look at the previous article on earth sheltered homes.