Passive solar heating and passive cooling—approaches known as natural conditioning—provide comfort throughout the year by reducing, or eliminating, the need for fossil fuel. Yet while heat from sunlight and ventilation from breezes is free for the taking, few modern architects or builders really understand the principles involved.

Now Dan Chiras, author of the popular book The Natural House, brings those principles up to date

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Learn how to use energy wisely.

"Pretty Good House provides a framework and set of guidelines for building or renovating a high-performance home that focus on its inhabitants and the environment--but keeps in mind that few people have pockets deep enough to achieve a "perfect" solution. The essential idea is for homeowners to work within their financial and practical constraints both to meet their own needs and do as much for the planet as possible. A Pretty Good House is : A house...

Krupp, longtime president of the Environmental Defense Fund, and Horn present a stirring and hopeful call to arms as they feature the bold innovators and investors who are reinventing energy and the ways we use it.

Explains how communities can move away from a reliance on oil to become more reliant on locally-grown, manufactured, and generated resources, including food, energy, and materials.

Prefabrication offers a simple path to the green home of your dreams, and in her latest book, Prefabulous author Sheri Koones highlights the many ways of using prefabrication to create almost-off-the-grid homes—houses that are not only environmentally friendly but often operate at nearly zero annual energy cost. Taking energy from the grid when necessary and returning any excess energy produced, almost-off-the-grid homes function on a fraction...

Now more than ever, the question of economic and environmentally friendly energy sources has become a hot topic in almost every American home. With that in mind, more and more people are turning to alternatives such as solar power as a means of saving money and reducing their imprint on the environment. This book will guide anyone interested in the process of installing and utilizing solar power for their home in the process of searching for, buying,...