Passive Solar House: The Complete Guide to Heating and Cooling Your Home

Passive Solar House: The Complete Guide to Heating and Cooling Your Home Review

Revised and Expanded Edition-Includes CD-ROM with Custom Design Software

For the past ten years The Passive Solar House has offered proven techniques for building homes that heat and cool themselves, using readily available materials and methods familiar to all building contractors and many do-it-yourself homeowners.

True to this innovative, straightforward approach, the new edition of this best-selling guide includes CSOL passive solar design software, making it easier than ever to heat your home with the power of the sun. Since The Passive Solar House was first published, passive solar construction expert James Kachadorian has perfected user-friendly, Windows-compatible software to supplement the design process explained in the book by allowing homeowners/designers to enter the specifications of their design and see how changing a variable will affect its energy efficiency.

This is the building book for a world of climbing energy costs. Applicable to diverse regions, climates, budgets, and styles of architecture, Kachadorian's techniques translate the essentials of timeless solar design into practical wisdom for today's solar builders. Profiles of successful passive solar design, construction, and retrofit projects from readers of the first edition provide inspiration to first-time homebuilders and renovators alike.

The Simply Solar House: Green Building on a Budget

The Simply Solar House: Green Building on a Budget Review

The Simply Solar House: Green Building on a Budget Feature

• ISBN13: 9780977490691
• Condition: New
• Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

"The Simply Solar House" is unique in its practical approach to designing a highly energy efficient house using common construction materials and practices. Drawing upon their experience building a solar house in central North Carolina, the authors describe the key features of energy efficient home design in simple and easy to understand language. This book is the perfect guide for cost conscious homebuilders who are inspired by the Green Revolution and passionate about preserving our environmental quality.

Natural Remodeling for the Not-So-Green House: Bringing Your Home into Harmony with Nature (Natural Home & Garden)

Natural Remodeling for the Not-So-Green House: Bringing Your Home into Harmony with Nature (Natural Home & Garden) Review

This absolutely indispensable and lavishly photographed guide will become a cornerstone work for years to come. It redefines the best way to "go green" and addresses a timely topic in a way designed to appeal to a growing and eager audience. Completely user-friendly and filled with motivational case studies and informative graphics. Every page leads would-be remodellers through the process of understanding their home and surroundings so they'll arrive at the perfect design solution.

Green House: Eco-Friendly Disposal and Recycling at Home

Green House: Eco-Friendly Disposal and Recycling at Home Review

The realities of climate change can be overwhelming, but the good news is that-with your help-global warming can be slowed and ultimately stopped. You may already recycle those newspapers and milk cartons, and perhaps you have a compost pile in the backyard. But what about that old inkjet cartridge? Or that scratched CD? Green House: Eco-Friendly Disposal and Recycling at Home is an A to Z guide to disposing and recycling all varieties of common household trash, from broken appliances to spent smoke detectors and cell phones to pet waste. With a sense of humor and an eye towards modern-day practicalities, Norm Crampton discusses the most environmentally-friendly methods of dealing with household waste, and when there are multiple disposal options, he describes the ins and outs of each alternative. Crampton also points out that some trash may be someone else's treasure-some recyclers may pay you for your old cell phone and your cooking grease can become bio-fuel! For homeowners and apartment dwellers alike, Green House is a handy little reference book and the first step towards reducing your ecological footprint.

Green Remodeling: Your Start toward an Eco-Friendly Home (The Green House)

Green Remodeling: Your Start toward an Eco-Friendly Home (The Green House) Review

Green Remodeling: Your Start toward an Eco-Friendly Home (The Green House) Feature

• Creative Homeowner Press #CH279053 Green Remodeling Book
• CREATIVE HOMEOWNER PRESS

Ultimate Guide to Green Remodeling shows homeowners how they can take part in the "green" revolution through remodeling. Some of the topics covered include reducing home energy use, selecting nontoxic products, saving water, and supporting the environment through the use of products that support responsible manufacturing and the sustainable harvesting of natural resources.

This Green House: Home Improvements for the Eco-Smart, the Thrifty, and the Do-It-Yourselfer

This Green House: Home Improvements for the Eco-Smart, the Thrifty, and the Do-It-Yourselfer Review

This Green House: Home Improvements for the Eco-Smart, the Thrifty, and the Do-It-Yourselfer Feature

• ISBN13: 9781584797869
• Condition: New
• Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

Just the thought of “going green” can make you feel blue. Trying to live sustainably sounds like a whole lot of work and a whole lot of deprivation. Well, Josh Piven aims to both shrink your carbon footprint and soothe your eco-anxiety. In a guidebook that’s as funny as it is practical, Piven shows you how to green every room of the house—and have a good time doing it. 

Projects range from the playful (raising trout in your swimming pool) all the way to big-time, serious home alterations (installing a root cellar) that will have your neighbors green with envy. Don’t fret if you’re not a natural wrench-turner: Most of Piven’s suggestions are inexpensive, totally approachable, and accompanied by clear illustrations. This Green House is likely to be the most entertaining homeowner’s manual you’ve ever used.

The Hand-Sculpted House: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to Building a Cob Cottage: The Real Goods Solar Living Book

The Hand-Sculpted House: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to Building a Cob Cottage: The Real Goods Solar Living Book Review

Are you ready for the Cob Cottage? This is a building method so old and so simple that it has been all but forgotten in the rush to synthetics. A cob cottage,cobb, however, might be the ultimate expression of ecological design, a structure so attuned to its surroundings that its creators refer to it as "an ecstatic house."
The authors build a house the way others create a natural garden. They use the oldest, most available materials imaginable--earth, clay, sand, straw, and water--and blend them to redefine the future (and past) of building. Cob (the word comes from an Old English root, meaning "lump") is a mixture of non-toxic, recyclable, and often free materials. Building with cob requires no forms, no cement, and no machinery of any kind. Builders actually sculpt their structures by hand.
Building with earth is nothing new to America; the oldest structures on the continent were built with adobe bricks. Adobe, however, has been geographically limited to the Southwest. The limits of cob are defined only by the builder's imagination.
Cob offers answers regarding our role in Nature, family and society, about why we feel the ways that we do, about what's missing in our lives. Cob comes as a revelation, a key to a saner world.
Cob has been a traditional building process for millennia in Europe, even in rainy and windy climates like the British Isles, where many cob buildings still serve as family homes after hundreds of years. The technique is newly arrived to the Americas, and, as with so many social trends, the early adopters are in the Pacific Northwest.
Cob houses (or cottages, since they are always efficiently small by American construction standards) are not only compatible with their surroundings, they ARE their surroundings, literally rising up from the earth. They are full of light, energy-efficient, and cozy, with curved walls and built-in, whimsical touches. They are delightful. They are ecstatic.

The Rammed Earth House: Rediscovering the Most Ancient Building Material (Real Goods Independent Living Book)

The Rammed Earth House: Rediscovering the Most Ancient Building Material (Real Goods Independent Living Book) Review

The Rammed Earth House is an eye-opening example of how the most dramatic innovations in home design and construction frequently have their origins in the distant past. By rediscovering the most ancient of all building materials —earth—forward-thinking homebuilders can now create structures that set new standards for beauty, durability, and efficient use of natural resources.

Rammed earth construction is a step forward into a sustainable future, when homes will combine pleasing aesthetics and intense practicality with a powerful sense of place. Rammed earth homes are built entirely on-site, using basic elements—earth, water, and a little cement. The solid masonry walls permit design flexibility while providing year-round comfort and minimal use of energy. The builder and resident of a rammed earth house will experience the deep satisfaction of creating permanence in a world dominated by the disposable.

The Passive Solar House: Using Solar Design to Heat and Cool Your Home (Real Goods Independent Living Book)

The Passive Solar House: Using Solar Design to Heat and Cool Your Home (Real Goods Independent Living Book) Review

This book offers a technique for building homes that heat and cool themselves in a wide range of different climates, using ordinary building materials available anywhere and with methods familiar to all building contractors and many do-it-yourselfers. A formerly patented design for author James Kachadorian's Solar Slab heat exchanger is now available for the use of anyone motivated by the desire to build a house that needs a backup furnace or air conditioner rarely if ever. This is a building book for the next century. Applicable to a diversity of regions, climates, budgets, and styles of architecture, Kachadorian's techniques translate the essentials of timeless solar design (siting a home in harmony with nature, using windows as solar collectors, achieving year-round comfort by balancing good insulation with healthy supplies of fresh air) into practical wisdom for today's new generation of solar builders.

The Sun-Inspired House: House Designs Warmed and Brightened by the Sun

The Sun-Inspired House: House Designs Warmed and Brightened by the Sun Review

The Sun Inspired House: Ideas and House Plans Using the Sun to Brighten and Warm Your Home is a unique combination of passive solar information and house plans designed to use the sun to maximum efficiency. The information is educational while the designs are inspirational. The elegant yet functional homes capture the non-polluting heat and wonderful light of the sun in a wide range of warm and welcoming styles. Blueprints are available for most of the designs.