Tony's House

Before starting to build I drilled five 9m boreholes on the site, two of these are for my interseasonal thermal storage. They are approximately central under each half of the house. On digging out the basement we were careful not to damage the pipes loaded into and grouted and managed to carefully re route them to in line with the central basement wall. These pipes will carry warm and hot water down under the house to a depth of 6.5m below the basement floor. The heat will be from the deliberate excess of solar thermal capture during the summer months. I will probably have to insulate the basement floor to stop it getting to warm down there!

I have three loops of pipe one full depth in each bore hole and one half depth in one bore only.

None of the holes hit any water! Two of the others are for drainage and one for a poor mans gshp or “earth tube” set up to pre-warm incoming ventilation air.

The basement floor has no insulation at present and as the ground underneath is likely to get warmer than the house the floor will very likely finish up as a platform floor with removable panels all over and removable insulation under them if needed to slow the passage of heat into the house.

In fact I laid a floating floor on 25mm eps as platform floor was astronomically expensive. The temperature in the ground fell from the end of December 2009 to March 2010 to 13.5C and peaked in September at 17.9C a meter below the middle of the slab. The boreholes started October at 23C falling to 20C by the end of the month. the ground temperature 1m below the basement floor was 17C at the end of october an the basement floor was at

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