Building to hold out the Russian winters

This is wonderful

It's awesome! Some critical thoughts i had. I've heard this moss can last for a long time, but i'd rather have a straw bale. Anybody else doubt that the bark of birch overlapping will last a long time? I can believe it's a good foundation because the roots will grow into it, looking for water come summer. Which will help it to stop the snow sliding off those shallow roofs.

It's great information John! As a builder I'm always fascinated by those well thought out methods, and old systems that have proven to work for humans fascinate me. But before somebody copies this one to one i mention some points i have doubts about. That's all. Let the hive mind have at it.

Climate is everything. In my very wet winters, *everything* rots! In Siberia, I suspect things are too cold to rot much of the time.

I am learning that how and when logs are harvested really makes a big difference. I believe one of the northern European groups would ring trees at one time, then peel the logs while they were still standing, and after a set time, finally fell them. They had learned that following this recipe, the logs would be stronger.

However, logs grown in cold areas by nature last longer - the rings are narrower. a 50 year tree grown in the far north will be much smaller in diameter than the same species grown in my ecosystem, and much smaller again, than one grown in the southern USA. My understanding is that as the level of CO2 in the atmosphere is rising, this too is making the rings wider and the wood less strong.

There are many factors at play. There emphasis on training and skill in carpentry is another important point. Children would have started learning these skills when modern children are sitting in classrooms.

That video reminds me of this:

Hugo Morvan wrote:It's awesome! Some critical thoughts i had. I've heard this moss can last for a long time, but i'd rather have a straw bale. Anybody else doubt that the bark of birch overlapping will last a long time? I can believe it's a good foundation because the roots will grow into it, looking for water come summer. Which will help it to stop the snow sliding off those shallow roofs.

I saw that video a few days ago, too - I watched it because I'm from the Interior of Alaska, which has a similar climate to Siberia. My thoughts on your thoughts, LOL!

You can build with straw-bale construction in that climate - if you can find the straw bales. In Alaska, farmers who grow grain and have straw for sale are few and far between (though they do exist - for a price; the straw is in high demand with people who have horses). Logs are much more available, and moss is an excellent chinking material for the gaps between the logs. It actually lasts quite a while, and when it does need to be replaced, it's easily available, usually for free. I would absolutely not chink between logs with straw, even if it was available. It wouldn't do nearly as good of a job at stopping drafts, and it's more attractive to anything that eats stuff like that than moss is. And believe me, if it's fifty degrees below zero (F) outside, or seventy below, or even colder, even the tiniest crack in your walls will become a whistling breeze letting your heat out and the cold in.  

Birch bark actually is very rot-resistant and long-lasting. It is so waterproof that if you cut birch trees down for firewood, you must split the chunks of wood open, or the bark will hold moisture in and cause the wood to rot out, leaving a tube of bark in a fairly short time. It's a little tricky using birch bark to shingle/waterproof a roof, because there will be a hole anyplace that there was a branch on the trunk of the tree, but with care, it's possible to make a very good water-tight roof with birch bark (remember, birch bark used to be used for building canoes, too). Eventually, several decades down the line, it will start to rot and will need to be replaced, but again, like the moss used for chinking the log walls, the birch bark is usually easy enough to come by, and free.

As for snow sliding off the shallow roof, first, the roof slope is shallow to keep the sod from sliding off. The sod is there primarily to protect the birch bark and to insulate the roof in the summer, helping to keep the house from getting too hot inside (because in a Continental climate, summers can get quite warm). The sod also prevents the winter snow from melting and sliding off of the roof; and the shallow slope of the roof is additional protection from the snow sliding off the roof, because you absolutely want that snow to stay there! That's why the roof is built so strongly, to support the snow loads. Although, most years, in Continental climates such as the Interior of Alaska, and much of Siberia, there really isn't that much snow. It's not like areas east of the Great Lakes, for example, which get 'lake effect' snow dumped on them many feet deep. But you need whatever snow you can get for insulation. Snow has about the same R-value as wood, depending on how densely packed the snow is (from .5 to 2.0 R-value per inch); a good snow cover on the roof can make a huge difference in how comfortable the inside of the house is when it's extremely cold outside. We used to shovel snow up against the sides of our cabin as deep and high as we could get it without blocking doors or windows; this helped keep the floors warm, too, because we didn't have the cold air under the floor.

We always had a space under the floor dug out for cool food storage, too; whether it was accessed through a trap door in the house, or via a doorway on the outside with steps down (or both) just depended on the builder. This space would work reasonably well as both a refrigerator and a root cellar most of the year. We raised potatoes to sell, and my dad's parents' house had a basement which stored potatoes very well.

We never actually lived on permafrost, but the method they used in the video for the foundation is very similar to what is recommended in Alaska for construction on permafrost. (Permafrost tends to be patchy; if the ground is well-drained, you won't have much of it, if any.)

It's a rough climate to live in, and a rough climate to build houses in - one reason houses tend to be small cabins is because you only have a few months of good weather for building. You can add on later, but if you try to start with a big house, you are likely to not even have it closed in by the time winter arrives.

A masonry stove, whether rocket mass heater or the standard Russian masonry stove (in it's many iterations), is the ideal method of heating one of these small houses. When you need heat ten months out of the year, reducing the amount of firewood you have to cut is huge! We usually had a barrel stove; those eat firewood really fast, and, even lined with sand or firebrick, they don't hold heat at all. Wish we'd known about the masonry stoves back then.