We live in an earth-sheltered house that we had built for us in 2002 within an old and disused quarry site in the Eden valley near Appleby in Cumbria.

The house has been built into the hole left by the removal of stone from the quarry. It was then back-filled and covered with earth from the site, making it pretty invisible except from the front. The house has two floors, with bedrooms downstairs and living rooms on top. The house faces south and has a full height conservatory, to make best use of passive solar energy. We have no heating system, relying on the heat we generate and capture, on the high levels of insulation that is built in, on the storage effect of the house, and on the stability of being underground.

Our goal was always to be environmentally aware and to limit our use of energy, so we use a heat pump to generate our hot water, using air from the conservatory as a heat source, we have constant ventilation through a passive heat exchanger to keep heat in the house, and we have a small set of photo-voltaic tiles to generate electricity.

You can find out more about the house from our website - www.theundergroundhouse.org.uk.

This blog is about the house now, and in particular about the addition this month of an Iskra AT5-1 5kW wind turbine.