Mark Donne

It's considered best practice to store roots and fruits in separate rooms*.

Properly ventilating a multi-room root cellar raises a few questions:
1) Does each room need a a dedicated air inlet pipe (i.e. one that leads directly outside), or is it sufficient to have a cold air inlet to the first room, and then another pipe near ground level connecting the first room to other rooms?
2) I assume each room needs an outlet vent, but is it possible for the pipes leaving each room to rise up a bit and then join together, thus sharing a common flue up to ground level? Since the purpose of using separate rooms is to keep the gases separate, I don't want the exhaust gases from one room just pouring into the other room via the joined pipe. But perhaps that would never happen so long as the pipes join above where they leave each room (because hot air rises)? I can install more than one flue to ground level if necessary, but a single pipe visible at ground level is obviously neater.

* (Of course these are more like 'cupboards' than rooms, but the point is that they are separated by walls so we need to keep the air flowing somehow.)

I'm following instructions to design a straw bale house. Currently just sketching out the design. I plan to make a 1-storey load bearing structure, with seven courses of bales:



There are meant to be hazel pins coming up from the baseplate, and down from the roofplate:



Then, there is a 4'6" pin coming down from the level of the fourth bales:



So far so good - none of the hazel pins collide. Next is where it goes wrong. According to Barbara Jones' book, there should also be pins of the same length coming down from the level of the sixth bales. As the sixth bales have the same arrangement as the fourth bales, this means that the hazel pins are directly on top of one another.

I might have thought this was deliberate, since it's possible that the intention is just to hammer the pins alongside the pins below - after all, hazel is bendy, and if they collide, it would probably not be too much trouble to just keep on hammering until they slide into place. However, there is no mention in the book that this could happen, and apparently the type of overlap is similar for all pins. As far as I can see, this would mean pins are right on top of each other, which is not the same scenario for all the other pins.

What have I gotten wrong? There is no diagram in the book and I can't seem to find anything online...