Plenum floor system for basementless houses

The plenum floor system for on-grade house construction combines desirable features of crawl space and slab on ground. In this unusual arrangement the floor is supported above a slab, leaving space between for the heating plenum and utilities. Joists may be supported by several methods, some of which any builder can use without purchasing special materials.

The underfloor plenum offers cost-saving advantages for on-grade construction. It eliminates most of the home buyers' objections to basementless houses. It produces warm floors made of attractive conventional materials, provides a location for plumbing where it will not freeze, and employs a simple, inexpensive but efficient and effective heating system. Construction costs can be reduced still more by packaging the heating system with other utilities in a "core," thereby eliminating most of the on-site labor involved in installing utilities.

There is nothing radically different or difficult about this new system of construction, but it requires a different schedule of on-site operations, which the builder can turn to a profit in reduced over-all construction time.

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Work Title Plenum floor system for basementless houses
Subtitle Better Building Report No.4
Access
Open Access
Creators
  1. Stout, G. J.
Keyword
  1. architecture
  2. engineering
License Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States
Work Type Report
Acknowledgments
  1. Institute for Building Research
Publication Date 1960
Subject
  1. Hot-air heating
  2. Floors
Language
  1. English
Deposited September 18, 2016

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