Hobbitry: living underground, part 1
Light

Our underground house was built in the summer of 1980, in the middle of one of the worst heatwaves in memory. My husband designed it himself. And except for the part of the work that really did have to be done by a building crew with cement mixers and bulldozers and similar devices, he built it himself, with our son Benjamin helping him with the lifting and hauling. In that blazing heat and smothering humidity.

I would have liked to have skylights, but George said no, because they would have drastically cut the house's energy efficiency. Light inside comes primarily from two sources: the big double-paned window at the front of the house, and fluorescent lights in all the ceilings. Some of those lights are the kind that you see in offices and stores, the ones that tend to do a lot of humming and hissing. That's annoying -- but not as annoying as spending $250 to $400 a month for heating in the winter and cooling in the summer. (Plus, it lets me grow fresh basil and rosemary and oregano indoors all year round.) In the kitchen, bathroom, and bedrooms there are ordinary lightbulbs (in recent years, fluorescent lightbulbs) in ceiling fixtures, and in lamps. We leave all the lights on during the day, even in empty rooms, because they help with the dampness problem.

Anybody claustrophobic would be frantic much of the time in our house; we have one relative who can only be comfortable here by sitting in the chair that faces our big front window. But the absence of windows in the rooms has never bothered me. I think I was trained by all the years that I spent studying or teaching in college and university buildings in California, where the building code for earthquake resistance means that many classrooms have no windows at all, and even the outside corridors and rooms have only narrow clerestory windows at the very top of the wall.

George built the house with a very open plan that had no hallways at all, with one huge central room and all the other rooms opening off that one, because in 1980 I was having to spend quite a lot of my time in a wheelchair. He had no way of knowing that moving to Arkansas was going to get rid of the need for that wheelchair, so he designed a floor plan that would let me get around in the house without having a lot of barriers to deal with. That turned out to be a good decision anyway. If we had the usual hallways and doors it would be much darker inside; with the open plan, the front window lights much of the house very well.

Heating and Cooling

We started with a small woodstove for heating in the front room, and a big exhaust fan for cooling in one of the bedrooms. And then "adjustments" had to be made.

The temperature in this house never falls below 59 degrees, even if it's well below zero outdoors, and never goes above 80 degrees no matter how hot it gets outside. That's a tolerable range for human beings, and if we'd never had any heating or cooling mechanisms we could have managed. However, George isn't fond of either of those temperature extremes -- hence the woodstove and the exhaust fan.

The woodstove is lovely in theory, and pretty to look at, but it didn't work at all for heating the house -- because it worked far too well. What happens is that even with a well-built and well-managed fire in that stove the temperature in the house goes to 85 degrees in about five minutes flat, and keeps right on going up. It's not that we don't know how to build the fire properly -- we do. But the house is so energy-efficient that very little heat turns into far too much heat in a hurry, and then there's nowhere for it to go. So, instead of the woodstove, we run a small electric heater (and all those fluorescent lights) during the day; we have no heat in the house at night, ever, and have never needed any. In our little dog's crate we put one of those round plastic heating disks that you activate with five minutes in the microwave, and that keeps her warm all night.

The walls and floors (insulated concrete surrounded by earth and solid limestone) absorb heat all summer long and release it for months into the winter; then they absorb cold in the winter and release it for months into the summer. This means that we never need heat until mid-December, and never need cooling until mid-June, and even then we only need either one for six weeks or so.

I didn't want air conditioning, and for a number of years we didn't have it. If it had been possible, I would have tried to make the case that for only six weeks it was a really foolish expense; I grew up in the Ozarks without any air conditioning, in the days when nobody had air conditioning. However, it turned out that we had no choice: George had to put in an air conditioner for our Macintosh computers. We humans could handle the heat and the humidity for a few weeks, but the computers absolutely could not tolerate either one. However, the air conditioner runs very little -- it almost never comes on at night -- and it runs maybe five minutes at a time. And of course it also helps with the dampness.