"Steve Shantz" wrote in message
ups.com...
Nick,

This sub-basement room would not be
used as a room. It would actually be
painted with a waterproof sealer, insulated
on all sides, and entirely filled with relatively
standard backfill earth materials, and used
as a "heat storage" area. A complex arrangement
of hollow tubes gets buried in the backfill material
to provide the method to get heat into and out
of the storage. Once this sub-basement was made
and filled in (and then properly compacted), a
standard basement floor would be poured on top of it,
and the house built normally above it. In other words,
the final house would show absolutely no evidence
of the sub-basement even existing!

How about digging out a part of the garden, installing foam insulation to
the sides and bottom of the hole, spiralling these hollow tubes around the
hole, backfilling and covering the whole garden area with foam insulation to
prevent the air having an influence on the earth temperature and then soil
on top. Must be an easier and cheaper way of doing it than having deep
foundations for two basements.