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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

How do the turf houses deal with pests? The walls are made of dirt. Wouldn't worms and insects be burrowing into the home constantly?

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The (American) classics Little House on the Prairie books told a story of a family who lived in a sod house and constantly had bugs, critters, and even snakes fall from their ceiling onto their dining table (and everywhere else)

I never read the books but watched some of the old TV show episodes. Those were depicted as wooden cabins in the TV show.

"On the Banks of Plum Creek" - The Ingals lived in a dougout sod roofed house in Minnesota.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Banks_of_Plum_Creek

There aren’t any pests like that to worry about in Iceland. You might see earthworms and spiders, but I doubt you’d see much beyond that.

Nowadays I suppose you might find ticks if they latch onto a bird and are left on the roof, but ticks are relatively new to Iceland and they’re typically not found in towns and cities.

Turf housing goes back to the Neolithic era and was spread throughout the globe, including of course Norway where the Icelanders came from. I've always wondered how they dealt with pests? Does the sod harden somehow?

I've never seen any pest problem in houses or structures built with or using turf in other ways. I have seen an old man picking lingonberries from a turf roof though. Not what I would call a pest..

I suspect they had a very different relationship with things we would find annoying.

I didn't even think of that, but I did think of moisture. In theory a good moisture barrier would help, but I don't think they had that in older times. I suppose a lot of heating on the inside would keep it dry, but heat + moisture = mold.

Wood heating combined with "natural ventilation" should take care of any excess moisture inside

Materials like this are actually quite good at not trapping humidity but allowing it to escape and evaporate. Turf and clay are actually making a comeback as an effective way to insulate houses for this reason. Turf and dry soil actually are a bit hydrophobic. They don't absorb water that well unless you completely drench them. That's actually a problem in dry regions. Because rainfall just erodes the soil instead of absorbing into it.

Having grass growing on the outside probably improves things. What little moisture is in there gets used by the grass. And the roots hold the whole thing together. And any excess water just runs off.

Mold is what happens when moisture can't get away. It's a problem in modern construction when using materials that don't let the water through. Like concrete.

Brick and plaster (as long as you don't seal it up with latex paint) are almost perfect at keeping proper humidity flow.

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