Hi all,
We're preparing for the construction of our new home and our thoughts have turned to root cellaring.  It seems like placing the cellar outside of the house envelope is the answer.  Which kinda bums me out.  I'd love to be able to go visit the cellar in the wintertime without going out into winter, but it's the way things are I guess...

My question is this -- Is there anything we can do while building the house that would make it easy to add a root cellar later?  Can we have one of the walls of the root cellar share an exterior wall of the house?  Is it better to be away from the house (heat source) entirely?

Looking for some guidance here.

More details:
- It'll be a house w/ walkout basement (we're on a slight grade, enough for a walkout, but no more)
- Plenty of land (and roughly the same grade available on other parts of the land)
- We're in Michigan (Ann Arbor area)
- We'll be growing quite a variety of food and starting an orchard.  From what I understand having at least two cellar areas is a good idea.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

I have an ICF home with a wine cellar and a "storage room" which is the modern equivalent of a root cellar. It's for storing fruits and root vegetables. Here in Western Washington, the temperatures hold between 55F and 59F, depending on season.

The rooms are separated from the heated spaces by about 5" of the ICF EPS foam and insulated doors I constructed. The rooms are cooled by their proximity to the bottom of the house excavation about 10' down. We did not insulate the slabs specifically to keep the floors cool. As I recall, most of the (unwanted) heat is exchanged through air leaks and the doors to the living spaces, although you will get some in Summer when the ground heats up to a certain depth. In this respect, the ICF does double duty by insulating the root cellar from the warmer ground towards the surface as well as from the living spaces.

If groundwater is not a problem, you could build a doorway into your basement that could later connect up to the root cellars, but the most cost effective way would be to excavate the root cellar and pour the walls at the same time your foundation work is being done, although I have no idea what code says about "underground rooms" built in that manner.

Huron,

It depends on what you are actually looking to accomplish. The real old time root cellars left a dirt floor and permeable walls to encourage evaporation which cause the rooms to stay significantly cooler and thereby extend the shelf-life of various food items. Light into the rooms was very limited. This kept things like potatoes from sprouting. barrels of apples and apple cider would typically be stored in an area like this.

ICF construction decreases water vapor permeability, airflow and evaporation. You would be better with poured concrete or masonry walls in this area, a concrete deck over it covered with dirt and dirt floors covered with lime and sawdust. It will stay quite cool. If you do not want as much cooling but rather just a storage space, what is mentioned by ICF hybrid will work.