This is a great, very fascinating YouTube channel.
Dirksen travels North America and Europe with her husband and 3 or 4 kids documenting home designs of all types. Lots of tiny homes in Los Angeles and California ( I believe one or two in Toronto ) as well as Western Europe. Her husband is from Catalunya so they've a bunch of clips from there. There's also one of a man who build a home sort of next to or inside a cave.
The coolest clips by far are ones of ancient abandoned villages and compounds (I think one castle-like structure) in Spain, Portugal and Italy that individuals took over and converted into homes.
I used to watch her videos back when she had very little followers. I'm glad to see she picked up so many subscribers, it's well deserved. I enjoy the way she interacts with the people because it seems more natural than the other heavily edited/pro formats.
Agreed on all points. Her family is a big part of that casual interaction since they're young enough to be super active and curious. They seem to get on especially well with older subjects
I only just discovered her during the pandemic and since then a lot of copy cat projects've popped up and moved on to bigger streaming platforms. I'd buy a DVD/Blu-Ray collection of her YouTubes
I really like her content, especially the earthship videos. The 'home engineering' that goes into these buildings is awesome. Though I'll probably never get to build one, would happily play a game based on this (like some sort of physics based survival game? Is this a thing?)
The earthship design includes a lot of ideas from permaculture design. Dirksen has also toured Brad Landcaster's site, in which the permaculture design is very obvious, and it is not an earthship. Those design principles and method applies to any region, biome, or climate, so even if you may never get to build an earthship, you can still use permaculture design wherever you land.
Hotel, not home. It may have started as "man was not meant to live in these temperatures" but it turned into a phenomenally ahead-of-its-time idea.
We went there a few years ago and it's insane that what you see is only half of what he did: the family was stupid enough to buy half and then destroy it "to use the land". In the category "not understanding what you have", this one's up there.
I have been both to this site and to Coober Pedy, South Australia. Pretty neat bit of architectural convergent evolution for extremely high temperature environments.
> It astounds me that these things do not catch on.
Basements are very common throughout the country. Once you've built a basement, you might as well put a house on the next floor up.
Modern insulation technology is very effective. It's much cheaper to put a lot of insulation in the above-ground portion of a house than to try to build the equivalent area entirely below the grade.
Building entirely below the surface without putting anything on top would be massively expensive compared to the same square footage in a traditional home, even if you accounted for equivalent insulation and cooling costs. It's not even close.
I lived in Fresno for 15 years. I spent north of $400 bucks a month on AC in the summertime (starts in June and goes till early November). I lived in a new home with modern insulation.
I now live in NY and I have a basement. It's generally about 10 degrees cooler. I would have loved that in Fresno.
Electricity in California is the most expensive in the country. When I lived there I spent between 20-35c/kWh. I moved to Utah and now pay approx 9c/kWh, cheaper by a factor of about 3. I live in the Southwest part of the state where the temperatures regularly hit 46c and my electric bill comes out to about $100.
typical wholesale prices are 2½¢ per kilowatt hour
solar panels are 8¢/peak watt https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... which works out to 40¢ per average watt assuming a 20% capacity factor. at 7% yearly interest, that's 2.8 cents per watt, and since a year has 8.766 kilohours, it's 0.3¢ per kilowatt hour. for ac inverter systems, balance of system costs typically triple this, and in the us, import tariffs double it again to 1.8¢ per kilowatt hour
the future is already here; it just isn't widely distributed. and that's why you're getting scammed
I mean I can get solar on my roof for about $4000Aud and then I pay nothing unless it's particularly cloudy.
But for grid electricity even if the generation is dirt cheap the power company in WA is responsible for covering an area the size of a chunk of Europe with a total population of under 3million.
There are significant distribution costs involved and I suspect even at the prices we pay its subsidised by the government.
$4000 is also pretty expensive; at my 7% yearly interest that's $23 a month. at my number of 0.9¢ per kilowatt hour that's 2600 kilowatt hours per month, an average of 3600 watts. i will be very surprised if you are using 3600 watts round-the-clock average unless you have a machine shop in your garage
so i think you are dramatically overestimating the cost of rooftop solar
I think that underground or earth bermed homes are often failures. There are different water and ventilation concerns for these. An above ground home is pretty accessible for repairs, but these can be nearly impossible if the home is underground.
This is what kills most "non-standard" homes and buildings - anywhere in the world.
If you build an American-style house in Bavaria it may end up a disaster because nobody around knows the building materials or how to fix it.
It gets even worse when it's entirely custom like this Skywalker style house, where it's a one-off using techniques nobody knows. You need a dedicated maintenance crew for that so they can learn all about it over time.
So something like this could work for a largish company, or a college campus, but as a one-off house it's going to be expensive and eventually abandoned.
I wonder if there aren’t zoning laws that create incentives for or against some of these approaches. In dry places the living space can be connected to rain-collecting cisterns that further help to reduce evaporation losses. When you free the surface to other uses, you can also generate power from wind or solar (and solar also helps to protect the top soil from evaporative losses).
> In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
> ... The best rooms were all on the left-hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.
It does not astound me. Building things underground is expensive and in a lot of cases not cost effective compared to the cost of electricity at human scale.
Totally off topic, but what is happening with YouTube ads? I'm getting 30 to 90 second unskippable videos before every video. This time it gave me two in a row. If I go to another tab it starts over, often with a longer ad.
I had started to think YT ads were getting worse recently but had convinced myself it was a frequency illusion. Interesting that others seem to be thinking that same thing though...
Do you also notice Google results getting even worse very recently? I noticed now besides retailers, I get news sites. Maybe it’s because of the election. It’s either product or news sites exclusively. Election or not, those two sites have the highest amount of ads.
No, they are getting worse. But it has changed progressively so there is not really a point in time when it went significantly worse rapidly (except if you’re collateral damage in the cat-and-mouse game with ad blockers).
But comparing across several years it is hard to ignore.
addressed somewhat to HN commenters in general and not just to you: it's okay to trust your first hand observations and real life experience from time to time instead of constantly reaching for increasingly complicated explanations for why you must be wrong when your experience doesn't match the data you've been fed
What are you using for an adblocker? I'm using uBlock (I thought it was uBlock Origin but apparently not now that I'm looking), and it also stopped blocking YouTube ads. (When it did block ads I'd have a 15-30 second black screen that I had to wait through.)
ublock origin is what you want to be using. ublock was the original project and the maintainer gave up maintenance to someone else. It didn't work out, so he came back and forked it as ublock origin. If you are having problems with ublock origin, read the troubleshooting section of the docs (or whatever they call it)
Use an Albanian VPN and you’ll get no YT ads on your phone. Toggle VPN only when you’re watching YouTube. Apparently Albania has banned ads on YT so you don’t get any.
I’ve noticed similar and assumed that they are taking a Starbucks-esque approach of adding more and more ad time until they start to see an overall drop in earning.
This is wonderful – however I feel a bit sad that is a museum rather than an active place people live. So many examples of wonderful architecture in California, but they are museums, and around them are built sub par structures.
Fwiw, there is an established community of people experimenting with underground homes in the western United states. These are places where folks actually live and the curious can rent for a short term. https://earthship.com/
Earthships are not underground. They have one wall that's stacks of old tires, with an above-ground dirt mound against that wall, and sometimes dirt on top of some of the roof (but mostly not).
Not just California - The Alamo in San Antonio is surrounded by cheap tourist stores.
It was run by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas for years and they did a great job but didn't have any influence over the zoning around the Mission. It is now run by the Alamo Trust and they have a plan and the ability to restore the plaza area around it.
Going underground is not a solution to rising temperatures. The reason why it’s good at keeping its temperature somewhat constant is because it is a poor heat conductor.
It’s fine for a cellar or something like that but larger structures still require air conditioning. See for example the London Underground where they have issues with the deep underground lines heating up over the years.
A major problem with the London Underground is the thermal energy introduced by trains and support equipment itself.
Spaces inhabited just by people and incidental devices (e.g., LED lighting, fans, personal electronics) should see far less heating effect, particularly if they're well-ventilated such that any accumulated heat could transfer out quickly.
Houses have had cellars and basements for centuries if not longer, and those aren't known for getting uncomfortably warm.
For large enough subterranean structures, air exchange becomes a challenge.
One place this is evident is with naturally-formed caves, where changes in atmospheric air pressure translate to air movements in and out of the caverns themselves, one consequence of which is the many "moaning caverns" --- the airflow and resonances are sufficient to create audible sounds associated with the movement. It can take hours for pressure to equalise if the volumes and apatures are sufficiently divergent.
Warm air will rise, and cold sink, yes, but if there are any trap-type structures (e.g., a tunnel which rises then descends again) the rising/falling air will be trapped at a local maximum or minimum. This is directly comparable to a thermal inversion associated with smog and urban pollution, often occurring during winter time. The only way around this is forced or active ventilation.
You've also got the "stale air" problem. If there's only a single entrance, or entrances are only on one part of the cave complex, air as a whole moves in and out of the caverns, but the deepest and furthest recesses see relatively little interchange. This leads to one of the hazards of spelunking in the event noxious gasses accumulate or oxygen is displaced.
For the London Underground (and other subway systems), much of the air exchange is provided by the trains themselves, through the "piston effect" of a trainset moving through a low-clearance tunnel. You'll experience this as the gust of wind which preceeds a train's arrival, or the suction as it leaves a platform. This effects some thermal transfer, but mechanical ventilation is still required.
Non-transport-oriented underground or partially-subgrade structures typically have far more relative air transfer, and would generally have less-signficant airflow / air exchange challenges, though I suspect there's still quite a bit of HVAC engineering involved, for thermal and other reasons (stale room-space air, radon emissions, mould & moisture, etc.).
Even then, it would surely take centuries for the cost of building underground to be paid off in power savings from the cost of air conditioning. Who's going to plan that far ahead, especially in the middle of unpredictable climate change where even the underground option might turn out to be the wrong one for some reason before it's paid off?
Not sure about the American southwest, but here in Europe we not only have heat waves, but also periods of heavy rain causing (more and more) severe flooding. I rather see everything on stilts in the future ;-/
You've been watching "the 12 monkeys" ? Or just read PKD's "The Penultimate Truth" ? Or even just "Terminator" because that seems to be about humanity's life underground. Or even the polish film "sexmission" from 1984. Or maybe Stanslaw Lem's "memoir found in a bathtub" about the pentagon 5 layers deep underground...
According to Wikipedia the first section, which includes Fresno, is currently expected to commence service in 2030-2033. Hope you have another trip before then!
Don’t feel too bad though. I’m simply waiting for them to continue the Bay Bridge bicycle path from Yerba Buena Island to San Francisco (completing the Oakland to SF bicycle path) and that’s also not slated for completion till 2030.
> Since so many people have asked about what happens when it rains, here is Shera's response: "Baldassare actually put drainage systems in place! Many of the rooms are built on a grade and sump pits are placed in strategic areas throughout the Underground Gardens where the water is directed to collect and reuse. While it does get muddy underground, we do not deal with any serious flooding."
My whole childhood I dreamed of digging secret tunnels and chambers all throughout my future house and yard etc. Imagine my dismay when I found out about water table and ventilation :-(
Presumably this wouldn't work in areas that flood, but Fresno isn't one of them. I also wondered about earthquakes, which are a risk in some parts of CA.
Yes. Because it can be semi-insulating (straw bales) or it can be externally insulated. Mass isn't just mass ... it needs controls and energy input. A hole in the ground is attached to the ground and that's the end of the story. No control. No thermal inputs.
Dirksen travels North America and Europe with her husband and 3 or 4 kids documenting home designs of all types. Lots of tiny homes in Los Angeles and California ( I believe one or two in Toronto ) as well as Western Europe. Her husband is from Catalunya so they've a bunch of clips from there. There's also one of a man who build a home sort of next to or inside a cave.
The coolest clips by far are ones of ancient abandoned villages and compounds (I think one castle-like structure) in Spain, Portugal and Italy that individuals took over and converted into homes.