When Dave Duffy asked me to host this blog it gave me a chance to talk about subjects that affect building, alternative or otherwise, beyond the kind that use hammer and nails. Here is one.

Buying a home is usually the biggest financial commitment a family makes. Often,while visiting real estate dealers, lawyers and bankers to get qualified for a mortgage and buying a home, some important aspects of what you are doing get obscured. Today I want to focus on two elements of home buying that slip by some people.

First is the real cost, in money, of a home. For this example let’s use a three bedroom modular cape on a modest lot in a subdivision. The price, a bit below national average, is $180,000. I use this example because I actually know people who have bought just such a place. You can adapt the numbers I use to your personal situation.

Let’s say you have been working hard, have $20,000 saved for a down payment and you get a 20 year mortgage at 6% interest on the $160,000 principal. My handy mortgage calculator says your monthly payment will be $1145.60 per month. Maybe a bit more with the little fees and such that banks add to these things.

Some people stop thinking at this point. They have the house, they accept the monthly payment challenge and settle in for the long haul of paying off the house. That payoff, after 240 months, is just about $275,000 plus the down payment for a total of nearly $300,000 dollars. Very sobering.

However, here is where reality takes a bite. To get that 300K you had to earn it. Before you paid the mortgage, even while you were saving up the down payment, you were making payroll taxes. In order to have $300,000 available to buy your home you had to earn closer to $400,000! That is financially brutal.

Now, I know there are accountant types who will talk about deductions and appreciation and “building equity in your home” and all that. Those nebulous benefits are mostly canceled out by insurance premiums, maintenance costs and property taxes. My point is that you will obligate yourself for a huge sum of money for your home which, ironically, won’t truly be yours until the last payment.

Take a deep breath. There is another perspective on what you have committed to when buying this home. Let’s say you have a job at United Blivits and make $50,000 per year. That is for 40 hours per week with two weeks vacation or 2000 hours @ $25 per hour.

$400,000 divided by $25 equals 16,000 hours of your labor or, eight solid years of work (16,000 hours divided by 2,000 hours per year). That is eight years of paying for absolutely nothing but the house. Well…actually house + interest + taxes.

Do your own calculations. Think this over. We will talk again. I have an idea for you.

Ever since I was a kid I have been interested in architecture of all kinds. The most impressive and among the oldest examples are the pyramids. They have been found in a number of places on earth. The best known are in Egypt.

My interest is how these things were built. The Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza in Egypt contains two million blocks, each weighing two tons. The original facing on the structure was marble (looted sometime in the past) and there was a special stone at the top rumored to have been gold or gold clad. The designing, planning and the methods involved in the construction of any of these wonders is astonishing.

The most perplexing mystery for me is how all those heavy blocks were stacked up so high. Theories include the use of hundreds of thousands of slaves working hundreds of years, to aliens with gravity defying devices used to float the stones through the air into place.

Among all the clues discovered was one which revealed to me, as a builder, the secret of the pyramids. The clue, attributed to most of the pyramids and other large stone edifices of early history, is the precision fit of the stones. It is commonly said a knife blade can not be inserted into the joints.

If the stones had been quarried miles away and somehow moved to the building site and put in place, getting them to fit so precisely would indeed require the aliens’ anti-gravity devices along with laser stone cutters.

However, there is a way the job could have been done using the available technology, workforce and materials at hand. It is a method called Rammed Earth. Imagine a wooden form 2 cubits x 2 cubits x 2 cubits (3.5′ x 3.5′ x 3.5′) that would produce a 4000 pound block. The form has four sides, no top or bottom, and could easily have been built with skills of the time period. The form is filled with a mix of sand (from the Sahara), clay and a little water (from the Nile) and some blood (don’t want to guess about that) as a binder. As the form is filled it is tamped down until it is very hard – in fact, as hard as stone. Much bigger blocks could be made this way too.

Now suppose the blocks were formed just a few inches away from where they were meant to end up. Once the form was removed the block could be pushed into place with simple levers and a couple of good kicks. If every other stone block was made using the form, the blocks in between could be rammed right in place. This explains the knife blade clue. The seams would be precise and tight.

Workers would use conveniently sized backpack type baskets to transport materials up ramps to the forms as the pyramid rose in elevation. Probably hundreds of forms would have been in use simultaneously. The lowest estimate of workers building the Egyptian pyramids was 3000 to 4000. With the Rammed Earth Method it is feasible for the construction to have been done in just a few years with such a small workforce and there were no unions back then to slow things down.

Add in many centuries of weathering and Rammed Earth blocks would be indistinguishable from quarried stone. I will concede that the marble and some of the special stonework in these structures would be quarried but over 90% of the mass could have been done with Rammed Earth.

I have capitalized Rammed Earth because it is a great building method you should think about. These days with motorized compaction machines, costing much less than slave labor, it is within reason to consider this method as part of your building plans. I suggest you use Portland cement as a more socially acceptable binder than blood. But that is up to you. Google tells all.

If my explanation of the Pyramid secret proves wrong, I am going with the alien theory.

Let’s get to J.R.’s other subject, a Masonry Heater for his new home. He has the basics right. The efficiency is much higher when burning the wood at a high temperature with air brought from outdoors directly to the combustion chamber. The heat is absorbed by the large mass of rock, block or brick surrounding the fire which, in turn, warms the home.

J.R. wants to bury the air intake pipe under enough ground to warm the air some before it gets to the fire during the winter. Then, in summer, air from the same pipe could cool the masonry mass.

But J.R. can avoid that extra work. The air intake pipe needs to only bring outside air of any temperature, by the shortest route, directly to the combustion chamber. Prewarming the air does not significantly change oxygen content or density of the air at the temperatures involved in home heating. And using the air from the same pipe for cooling the mass in summer isn’t necessary. I’ll get to that in a minute.

These heating systems are a lot of work to build. There has to be a mass weighing a number of tons of mostly stone, brick or block that is skillfully put together. Beyond that the builder needs to understand and accommodate the various functions of the parts in order for it to be an efficient heater. That is why you don’t see many of them around.

Your multi-ton masonry mass will be sitting on a concrete slab that rests on the ground. In summer the mass will conduct its heat down through the slab into the ground. Ground temperature stays within a narrow range all year. Here in our part of New England ground temperature under our foundation slab is in the mid-50s in late summer and may cool to the mid-40s in late winter. So when the masonry mass is no longer being heated by a wood fire it cools to near ground temperature all by itself in a week or two and automatically air conditions your home all summer. Actually, you and everything in your home are radiating heat to the masonry mass which is conducting it into the ground under your home. Kind of mystical isn’t it?

Right now it is 88 degrees outside. But our inside temperature is a bit under 60. Plus our air vents all around the house are open. This apparent anomaly is because the masonry mass cools (and heats) the home with radiant heat, not convected heat as are most “modern” homes. The above photo shows about one third of the 47-ton masonry mass in our 3500 square foot home silently doing its work without electricity.

So, J.R., put away the shovel. Find BHM issue #90, page 46, and BHM issue #91, page 8, and you will have all the information about owner-built Masonry Mass Heating and Cooling Systems you will need along with many peripheral details you might like. I have built, if I remember right, about 20 various sized systems like this, learning things all along the way.

If you can’t find the BHM issues mentioned, write again.