Talk:Underground living

Okay, I'll admit the article is sourced and that seems to be a reasonable argument for its existence. But why is the threat of flooding the biggest problem with underground living we can come up with? What about the experiments conducted in the past few decades where humans lived underground for period of weeks to months, and ended up with everything from skewed sleeping patterns to depression? Unfortunately I can't provide any sources, but someone should look into this... I know National Geographic for one had several articles on this topic. 68.146.39.136 07:38, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

The Global Warming Solution
Okay, underground houses need no heating or cooling if built properly, even in cold climates. I really don't see why we can't go large-scale on this. I mean, there are developers out there why build such energy-inefficient houses, why don't they do this. Selling a house that consumes no energy would be a big sale. The human race really has to advance faster on issues like this. Winkelix 00:30, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

The building industry is very conservative, and for a good reason, there have been many large scale building experiments that have turned out to be disastrous. Building underground is tricky because the earth underground is usually very moist, you have to adapt the building to the site specific conditions carefully. If there are mistakes made you'll get rot, leaks and in worst case your house might flood. If you succeed at making your house waterproof it's might be more or less airtight as well. That means no ventilation, unless you add a ventilation system. That means huge heat losses unless you have a really good ventilation system (with heat exchanger and such). So there are many challenges that one might not consider initially when thinking about a new design like this. That they don't need heating or cooling is not true, it's just that they would need less than a conventional, above ground, house. It's perfectly possible to build a house that doesn't need heating though (this is usually done above ground currently). During the 80's a lot of people built well insulated houses, that meant cutting down on ventilation which meant really bad indoor climate and mold problems (because of moisture problems). So today a lot of people are very skeptical to well insulated houses. Modern super insulated houses pay close attention to ventilation and moisture though. See Zero_energy_building. If you manage to solve the problems with building underground there are great advantages to such a building, but it's generally not easy. I think the PSP system is interesting though, as an ultra low cost building method. —Apis (talk ) 15:25, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Vietcong
There should be something about the Vietcong in this section, due to their extensive tunnel network they used in the Vietnam War.

the article picture
...looks like a Michigan militia's central HQ, not a typical underground house.

http://www.simondale.net/house/ for a more realistic view. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.69.219.3 (talk) 03:07, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Underground houses of Tunisia
Hi, missing the underground houses of Tunisia. It seems they have no proper name, and perhaps therefore are not listed as underground homes, dwellings or architecture. The article on Matmata states "Some of the local Berber residents live in traditional underground "troglodyte" structures", which sounds a bit odd. T 88.89.5.29 (talk) 07:04, 14 July 2018 (UTC)