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Does anyone have design guides or experience with earth tubes? They are burried in the ground and are used to heat / cool air to the ground temperature.
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we have one installed under our driveway and under the garage into the full basement.. it is 3 sections of corrugated alum. culvert.. 24 inch.. (60 ft. long)
it's big enough to crawl thru if you want to inspect it..
bought it from our highway dept. when we built the house...
we don't use it.... but it's there if we want to hook it up to a blower..
the corrugated alum. and sealed joints are needed so you don't introduce any ground water into the system..
you could also use plastic pipe or tarred concrete pipe.. but they won't give the same cooling rate as the alum...
here's the caveat...the alum. will be below the dew point.. so the incomming air will be chilled.. the idea being to drop as much moisture out of the air as you can... but in coastal areas like ours.. that is still a lot of moisture... so proceed with caution..
you may have to dehumidify....
another thought we had was .. if you are sure you are above the water table.. you could put crushed stone under the corrugated alum. and drill holes in the bottom so the condensate would drip out...
some day i may even hook it up... soon as i finish the rest of the house...
*I would think that dehumidification would be a must. Otherwise, cool, damp places are great breeding grounds for legionella microbes.Andy
*I saw an article on that subject a couple of months ago in Builder Mag. Luck
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Does anyone have design guides or experience with earth tubes? They are burried in the ground and are used to heat / cool air to the ground temperature.