Call it "Structural Insulated Snowpack"

comments (0) January 11th, 2010 in Blogs

Debra Silber, managing editor

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Video Length: 2:59
Produced by: BBC

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Before you say, “huh?” let me explain that I stumbled on this video a few hours after a discussion of Passive House technology (check out FHB #210 for more on that), at a time of year when, here in Connecticut, we’d just received a substantial delivery of the required building material. If “make do with what you have” is a motto you build by, draw a minute’s inspiration from this father-and-son team. Sure, snow has an insulation value of about R-1 per inch, but it’s hard not to marvel at the craft involved, no matter how primitive the materials. Maybe it’s not really true that Eskimo have hundreds of words for snow. But if they did, one of them would probably be “SIP.”

By the way, it’s not the first time igloo-building has caught the imagination of Fine Homebuilding editors—if you remember our first back cover, from February 1981.

posted in: Blogs, green building, architecture, insulation

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