6 Comments

1. Expert Member
   MALCOLM TAYLOR | May 12, 2017 11:22pm | #1

   Overly pessimistic
   Surely you could send a child with a brush into a small diameter pipe than four feet?

2. GBA Editor
   Martin Holladay | May 13, 2017 05:35am | #2

   Response to Malcolm Taylor
   Malcolm,
   You're right. I forgot about all the times I crawled into culverts when I was a kid. It was fun.

3. 
   STEPHEN SHEEHY | May 13, 2017 09:04am | #3

   Response to Martin and Malcolm
   It's important to plan ahead for cleaning earth tubes. If you put a rope in during installation, all you need to do is find a child who's a tight fit, tie the rope to his feet and pull.

1. 
   Yury__P | Feb 28, 2020 01:12pm | #5

   This is by far my favorite comment! Thank you Stephen, you made my day! :)

4. 
   user-6829222 | May 17, 2017 12:42pm | #4

   earth air tubes- JM
   Nice article Martin. I'm on year six with my earth air tubes... with no cleaning. I can't scientifically say there has been no problems- but I can say that anecdotally.... I have had no problems. I'll have to find someone with a scope to inspect them I guess. But everything seems to be working fine. And my tube cost was the cheap one. At the beginning of the season is when you have the highest 'capacity'. Moving from winter to summer... ground is still cold... and you are using it to 'cool incoming air'. Summer to winter- ground is still hot and you are using it to 'heat incoming air'. There is roughly a 16 degree temperature swing from beginning to end of season. Could be more or less- depending on tube depth. At $1800- I would still say it is worth it. It eliminates the cost of preheat on a H/ERV... both the up front equipment cost, and the energy use cost over the life. Another interesting point- all cost comparison is based on indoor set temperatures... 68-72 F... If your goal was instead to 'survive' - they would have much higher value as passive means to keep your home from freezing. - Jason Morosko

5. 
   DPiranesi | Jun 14, 2020 05:49pm | #6

   Martin highlighted this great article in a June 2020 mailing. I figure he probably did it bec. GBA is a treasure trove and some of us do need a tour guide sometimes. The article is of interest to me because some professionals (though not others) believe that I ought to dig a costly French drain and I haven't ruled it out. It's a hill and the footings are really deep. A neighbor told me his drain involved trenches as deep as 16+ feet. I suppose mine might be more like 8 feet, hard to tell. Mainly all you'll see is some trickles after a rain. But digging is still a maybe, because hydrostatic pressure from the hill above can affect IAQ or so my nose says sometimes. (That's also reason enough for me to be cautious about crawlspace-floor vapor barriers.)

   I would hope to do some cost-benefit analysis on earth tubes for myself. Though it's a shame the building industry seems to have nobody available who can help me with that for any price. Generic payback numbers on anything at all are never of interest to me. First of all, those generic numbers always omit to count the budget I already have for renovating a resilient antique. In this case that's the budget for comfort and IAQ. Also generic payback numbers always seem to be about new construction. And they seem to assume that a homeowner cares a lot about beyond-compliance energy efficiency measures but does not care about beyond-compliance comfort and IAQ. I could point to others who are far more picky and have far greater budgets than I, especially in California's climate zone 3C.

   So with that long explanation, this is a lot of really interesting material to study and it's likely to keep stimulating my curiosity. As for getting anyone competent to do the work that seems next to hopeless in 2020-2021. Maybe this is some project I take on when I retire. From time to time I end up having to tell people, well I am an engineer, and even though my name was the last one on the list, I am qualified . Thanks again for an outstanding 5-star article Martin, I am a fan.