Earth floors. Suitability and practicality

[Tim_Gilbert]

@Paul_Hadfield

Now to get heat pump ready, but should that include replacing the suspended timber floor on half of our house’s ground floor with an earth floor, as done by heat pump aficionado Florence Collier of Humblebee Eco
(Carbon Coop member and webinar giver I believe, but not on this forum perhaps, given that @florence doesn’t seem to give any response) so that we can install underfloor heating without incurring the huge upfront/embodied carbon cost of a concrete floor? Was it her house and earth floor to which recent open day visitors were kindly invited? (Not revealed until signed-up, and the visit was fully booked within 6 hours of me receiving the email, which sadly was before I saw it and attempted to book).

Generally, yes you want to convert to a “solid” insulated floor if at all possible. The exact nature of it is debatable. I am planning to convert to insulation and concrete screed. An earth floor wouldn’t be a good idea for me due to flood risk. I want to make the house as resistant and resilient as possible.

How deep is your crawl space and what do you have down there? Where is your water table? Where are nearby high risk flood areas. Taking global warming into account?

[ian]

Worth reading Flo Collier’s write up of how she put in an earth floor https://www.humblebee.eco/post/earth-floor-1-of-2?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=blog.post-promoter&utm_campaign=bf8a901b-5417-451c-a8be-152a220a744d and https://www.humblebee.eco/blog/archive/2024/10

[Paul_Hadfield]

Thanks, belatedly, Ian. Florence does comment that it was a very expensive option. Mostly due to high labour costs, I guess. I wonder whether it is possible to estimate the embodied (aka upfront) carbon of a high labour-intensive service like theirs. I will ask.