The Passive Solar House - Softcover

James Kachadorian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0930031970 ISBN 13: 9780930031978

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 1997

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

James Kachadorian is a civil engineer with degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He is the founder of Green Mountain Homes, which gained national recognition as the first provider of over 300 innovative, "kit" solar homes. He has lived in his own passive solar home in Woodstock, Vermont for over 25 years.

Reviews

Published in concert with the Real Goods Trading Company of California, this book explains in detail the whys and wherefores of a particular form of passive solar design, formerly patented but now in the public domain. The patent was held by the author and used while he was president of Green Mountain Homes, a fabricator of post-and-beam kit homes. The science he used and describes here is settled and elegant, even quaint, and is detailed to a degree that could be off-putting to some readers. On the bright side, the enthusiasm he brings to the subject is useful, even to those prospective homebuilders who may not be interested in solar heating and cooling. The book is suffused with a sensitivity to environmental issues of all sorts, a useful perspective in these resource-limited times. An essentially simple book, elegant in presentation and forceful in argument; recommended for extensive scientific (for the references and associated calculations) and/or broader home-building collections.?Alexander Hartmann, INFOPHILE, Williamsport, Pa.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Company
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0930031970
• ISBN 13: 9780930031978
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 220