Superinsulating a house does have advantages, but if you think about it, your soil is a huge thermal mass, it takes in outdoor heat in the summer gives it to the house in the winter, like a passive geo-thermal heat pump. Yes 58 or 60 degrees is pretty cool, but a sweater fixes that. If you are not paying to heat or cool the basement, you can achieve near underground temperatures year round by insulating correctly. That being said, I would go ahead and recommend insulating the inner surface of the walls just because it's so much easier.
|