Switch to solar with a system built for you. Since ancient times, people have found ways to use the sun’s heat to stay warm or keep cool. They built homes from clay and other materials that hold heat ...

Do you enjoy coming home to a warm home in the dead of winter? Do you leave your furnace running in cold weather even if no one’s home? If you want to keep the house warm for when you return later in ...

A passive solar-heated home needs no solar panels to heat or cool it. Rather, the energy used to heat and cool a house comes directly from the sun through skylights and windows. Some of that energy is ...

Q. I feel the sun shining in a living room window and it's very warm. My budget is pretty tight, but I want to make or install something to capture that heat and lower my heating bills. What do you ...

As I discussed in last week’s column ("Resilience: Dramatically Better Building Envelopes," Jan. 4), a resilient home is extremely well-insulated, so that it can be kept warm with very little ...

Now that the winter solstice, the shortest daylight day of the year, is behind us I’m reminded of how important it is to let the sunshine into our lives. There are many benefits to having large ...

Dear Jim: We have a large family and use much hot water. I cannot afford to have a solar water heating system installed, but I would like to make some type of solar water heater myself. What do you ...

SOLAR HOT WATER pre-heat systems fall into two basic categories active and passive types with numerous subcategories. A passive solar DHW pre-heater is also known as a breadbox heater or batch heater.

Fig. 4-7: This mass wall in the attached sunspace I designed for my previous home heats up during the day and radiates heat into the adjoining room at night. Fig. 4-8: Solar cookers like this one can ...

It won't be long before winter hits us again, and I promised myself last year that we'd do what we could to our home to make it more comfortable this year. It stayed cold indoors all last winter, and ...

Following the first energy crisis in 1973 there was a rush to heat homes with the sun. It was a tinkerer's paradise, with all manner of solar heating systems migrating from garage workshops to ...