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Comment by illuminant | Hacker News Reader

It astounds me that these things do not catch on.

> It astounds me that these things do not catch on.

Basements are very common throughout the country. Once you've built a basement, you might as well put a house on the next floor up.

Modern insulation technology is very effective. It's much cheaper to put a lot of insulation in the above-ground portion of a house than to try to build the equivalent area entirely below the grade.

Building entirely below the surface without putting anything on top would be massively expensive compared to the same square footage in a traditional home, even if you accounted for equivalent insulation and cooling costs. It's not even close.

I lived in Fresno for 15 years. I spent north of $400 bucks a month on AC in the summertime (starts in June and goes till early November). I lived in a new home with modern insulation.

I now live in NY and I have a basement. It's generally about 10 degrees cooler. I would have loved that in Fresno.

Is power just very expensive in Fresno?

$400pm just for aircon seems crazy high to me.

Living in Perth, Western Australia id use that over a 2-3mth period over the summer running aircon 24/7

Electricity in California is the most expensive in the country. When I lived there I spent between 20-35c/kWh. I moved to Utah and now pay approx 9c/kWh, cheaper by a factor of about 3. I live in the Southwest part of the state where the temperatures regularly hit 46c and my electric bill comes out to about $100.

9c per hour is insanely cheap :o

For comparison I'm paying 31.6c/kwh and 113c/per day supply charge. (prices in AUD cents)

Think that's about 21c USD

9¢ per kilowatt hour is insanely expensive

typical wholesale prices are 2½¢ per kilowatt hour

solar panels are 8¢/peak watt https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... which works out to 40¢ per average watt assuming a 20% capacity factor. at 7% yearly interest, that's 2.8 cents per watt, and since a year has 8.766 kilohours, it's 0.3¢ per kilowatt hour. for ac inverter systems, balance of system costs typically triple this, and in the us, import tariffs double it again to 1.8¢ per kilowatt hour

the future is already here; it just isn't widely distributed. and that's why you're getting scammed

I mean I can get solar on my roof for about $4000Aud and then I pay nothing unless it's particularly cloudy.

But for grid electricity even if the generation is dirt cheap the power company in WA is responsible for covering an area the size of a chunk of Europe with a total population of under 3million.

There are significant distribution costs involved and I suspect even at the prices we pay its subsidised by the government.

> responsible for covering an area the size of a chunk of Europe

3x bigger than Texas for the North Americans, with the majority of that population about one extended urban area.

Correct! And about 120km end to end (depending on what you choose to define as "urban")

Driving from the southern tip of WA to the northern most point takes over 36hrs of continuous driving (~3600km)

All this is to say its pretty fucking big

$4000 is also pretty expensive; at my 7% yearly interest that's $23 a month. at my number of 0.9¢ per kilowatt hour that's 2600 kilowatt hours per month, an average of 3600 watts. i will be very surprised if you are using 3600 watts round-the-clock average unless you have a machine shop in your garage

so i think you are dramatically overestimating the cost of rooftop solar

It's 3-4 times more expensive to use electricity in california than it is in Texas. sometimes 5 times more for peak usage hours during the summer.

Fresno is in earthquake country, so they don't really build them here. However, it looks like this place has held up just fine over the years.

I think that underground or earth bermed homes are often failures. There are different water and ventilation concerns for these. An above ground home is pretty accessible for repairs, but these can be nearly impossible if the home is underground.

This is what kills most "non-standard" homes and buildings - anywhere in the world.

If you build an American-style house in Bavaria it may end up a disaster because nobody around knows the building materials or how to fix it.

It gets even worse when it's entirely custom like this Skywalker style house, where it's a one-off using techniques nobody knows. You need a dedicated maintenance crew for that so they can learn all about it over time.

So something like this could work for a largish company, or a college campus, but as a one-off house it's going to be expensive and eventually abandoned.

I wonder if there aren’t zoning laws that create incentives for or against some of these approaches. In dry places the living space can be connected to rain-collecting cisterns that further help to reduce evaporation losses. When you free the surface to other uses, you can also generate power from wind or solar (and solar also helps to protect the top soil from evaporative losses).

Also, Radon. [https://www.epa.gov/radon/epa-map-radon-zones-0]

Good point.

It's neat as an art project, but we aren't hobbits. People like windows.

While true, high ceilings with light scoops could be the rage.

> In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

> ... The best rooms were all on the left-hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.

> we aren’t hobbits

Speak for yourself

It does not astound me. Building things underground is expensive and in a lot of cases not cost effective compared to the cost of electricity at human scale.

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