Presents information on how to improve a home's energy efficiency and switch to renewable energy resourses to provide electricity, hot water, heat, and cooling for a home.
"Whether you are just curious or an industry expert, this handbook will show you how to stretch your energy dollars (doing much more with less) while powering your home with clean, dependable, renewable energy. And, unlike fossil fuels or nuclear energy, renewable energy frees you from worry about dumping today's pollution on tomorrow's children"--Back cover.
In a clear, nontechnical language, this book explains how solar heating works and how it can be applied to your home - in active and passive space heating, domestic water heating, and pool heating.
"Natural Home Heating" is the first comprehensive guide to heating your home with renewable energy sources. Greg Pahl offers a well-organized, easy-to-understand tour of all available home-heating options, including traditional oil and gas furnaces, wood stoves and masonry heaters, active and passive solar systems, and heat pumps. Included is everything you need to know about the fuels, systems, technologies, costs, and advantages and disadvantages of each option. Pahl teaches homeowners how to retrofit existing heating systems and choose renewable replacements, or design an entirely new house that can be heated comfortably with minimal environmental and financial impact. Consider: - 95% of American homes are heated with fossil fuels. - Oil and gas prices are up by more than 20% as supplies dwindle and sources become less reliable. - Home heating costs could double or even triple in the event of a fuel crisis. - The fossil fuel economy is unsustainable. - There are viable, clean, healthy, and afford able home heating alternatives! Learn how to burn environmentally friendly bio-diesel fuels, not just in your car, but in your furnace. Find out how a ground-source heat pump works and why it can achieve 400% heating efficiency. Discover what it takes to make burning wood truly sustainable. Natural Home Heating explains all these details and more, making it unique in the marketplace.
Over 90 percent of US power generation comes from large, centralized, highly polluting, nonrenewable sources of energy. It is delivered through long, brittle transmission lines, and then is squandered through inefficiency and waste. But it doesn't have to be that way. Communities can indeed produce their own local, renewable energy. Power from the People explores how homeowners, co-ops, nonprofit institutions, governments, and businesses are putting power in the hands of local communities through distributed energy programs and energy-efficiency measures. Using examples from around the nation - and occasionally from around the world - Greg Pahl explains how to plan, organize, finance, and launch community-scale energy projects that harvest energy from sun, wind, water, and earth. He also explains why community power is a necessary step on the path to energy security and community resilience - particularly as we face peak oil, cope with climate change, and address the need to transition to a more sustainable future. This book - the second in the Chelsea Green Publishing Company and Post Carbon Institute's Community Resilience Series - also profiles numerous communitywide initiatives that can be replicated elsewhere.
An essential how-to on powering your home with sun, wind, water, and more. For readers wanting to save money-and the planet-by using alternative energy, this book provides everything they need to know. The five basic sources are fully covered: sun, wind, water, earth, and bio. The benefits, what is needed, and whether it will work for a particular home are all carefully laid out in this comprehensive overview: ? Solar energy for home heating, water heating, and electricity ? Wind power, hydrogen, and micro hydro power ? Heat pumps-air, geothermal, and water source ? Heating with wood and going bio
The do-it-yourself guide for converting your home to solar power Solar energy is clean, efficient, sustainable—and expensive. Or is it? Many homeowners simply assume that the cost of solar panels is out of their reach, but in reality, the technology is quickly becoming attainable for the middle class. Rather than leasing panels from one of those home solar startups (and letting them reap the financial benefits), why not join the thousands who are doing it themselves? In Solar Rooftop DIY, sustainable energy expert Mike Sullivan offers five design plans—ranging from a few simple panels to a complex, roof-covering array—for building a rooftop PV energy system for any home. Each plan has clear and detailed step-by-step photographs showing the installation process. Many of them require no additional labor—just a few days' commitment for the average weekend warrior. With energy costs only set to increase in the future, now is the time to make the switch to solar and start selling power back to the grid.