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

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.

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.