Dated: March 4, 2013

I found the following references and resource very useful in this project.

First off, my architect, John Hermannsson. He has pointed me to many different places:

John Hermannsson, Architect  LEED  AP                              www.greenguide.com
Hermannsson Architects
2659 Spring Street
Redwood City, CA 94063

I have been wanting to live in an earth sheltered house since my college days.   This is much more in harmony with nature than a conventional
structure. John has some unique combination of talents and training that has really helped pull this off and get it working, and I am very grateful for his architectural expertise in doing this project for me.  This is my answer to climate change.  Could anyone ask for more?

One of the first places he pointed me to was Earth Sheltered Technology: www.earthshelteredtech.com
These people have been in business for multiple decades doing this type of construction and have honed the techniques that they use. The owner is Jerry Hickok, and his son Jeff Hickok is inheriting the business from him. They have both been very patient with me and my ton of detail questions that I ask them in order to have information for the house design.  EST provides a basic shell (concrete walls and dome ceilings) built out of modules, and these shells are strong enough to have earth cover them up after they have been built and cured (for strength).  They only provide the structures, the finishing work needs to be completed by others.

Although I haven’t used many ideas from the next site, I still find it interesting to look at: www.thenaturalhome.com
I have used a few of their ideas in previous designs, just not a lot in the current one.

One of the areas in the home is a control room/music studio. Although I cannot build it quite the way it is supposed to be done, I’m trying to get it done as best as possible. One very good reference for this is the book “Home Recording Build It Like the Pros” by Rod Gervais. published by Course Technology, 2006. Rod has worked in construction of studios for a long time, and in this book he details out lots of different areas, techniques and materials for building a quality studio.

John pointed out the following site as a low cost unskilled labor approach to building block walls: www.vobb.com   Although they cannot ship from Florida to Oregon, there is a local company which can provide dry stack blocks.

Passive solar design is a factor.  http://susdesign.com is one site that has tools for this.

As I am looking into renewable energy sources (solar and wind), web sites for those products are very important to me. Energy use studies have shown that the single biggest use of energy in the modern home is for space heating/cooling, the second biggest use is for hot water heating.
For wind power, I have been looking at Southwest Windpower’s site: www.windenergy.com   I had been using the Whisper 500 for planning purposes, but they are coming out with a new product, the Skystream 600, which may be very good to use in low to moderate wind. However, the one problem with wind energy at the moment is its cost compared to photo-voltaic panels. I am holding off on wind power for now.
For solar power, John had suggested a dual-function solar panel, photo-voltaic generation and direct heat exchange hydronic  tubing to store heat in the ground around the house.  I have yet to find the site for those, so I am going with standard photo-voltaic panels for now..
For hot water, the sun can at least preheat the water that goes to the water tank. www.hillssolar.com.au has an example of this type of system.
I am not putting this in since the heat pump I am installing will have a hot water option on it.

One very nicely done energy use monitoring house can be found at www.ourcoolhouse.com by Phil Malone. I most likely will be using some of his technology, services and suggestions.  He also has a lot of links to other sites he found useful.

Of course, being able to find things is essential, and I usually use www.google.com for searches. I have also used http://maps.google.com as a good resource.