Eco-Friendly Green Lifestyle

The active air system that heats this house has an unusual storage arrangement: the masonry north wall serves as a well- insulated rock heat storage bin. Filled with 60 tons of fist-size rocks, the bin receives heated air from the collectors through ducts leading into its bottom. Hot air then travels up through the rocks, [...]

Though the ducts and rock storage bins of active air systems are space-consuming, they set no unusual limits on the architectural style of new homes built to incorporate them, beyond the basic requirements of southward orientation and energy conservation. Traditional-looking houses can shoulder their solar collectors as gracefully as “futuristic” ones, and their interiors can [...]

If you want to build a green home, buy and renovate a derelict building to become a green home, or to adapt your own home to be more green, the chances are you’ll need a mortgage — a loan secured against the property concerned.
Few high street lenders are geared specifically to deal with green projects [...]

Dramatically successful in achieving its goal of almost 100 percent active solar heating, this house was built more as a demonstration of an active heater’s capabilities than as an example of a practical solar application. Such a system is uneconomical not only because of its overall cost, but also because much of the collector and [...]

Built on the beach, this house has an elegantly clean design that combines a number of active features with passive direct gain to make its solar heating system work exceptionally well. The basic solar heater is an active liquid type: 450 square feet of flat-plate collectors (all-copper tube-type absorbers with a selective surface and single [...]

Though the style of this house is hardly conventional, its dual solar heating-and-cooling system is ingenious and functional. The system is a hybrid, using both active and passive techniques to keep the house comfortable.

Solar heating is by no means limited to single-family homes. It adapts easily to multifamily housing, as long as there is the necessary south orientation and enough roof area to hold an adequate number of collectors.
In fact, from a solar viewpoint, adjoining multifamily units have two advantages over separate homes: they tend to be smaller, [...]

To make your workplace greener, you use the same green principles and methods as you do at home. There are dozens of tips that you can apply to the workplace:
Set up a complete recycling system — for bottles, cans, photocopier cartridges, and plastic. Reuse anything that can be reused, such as CDs, and recycle the [...]

The trickle-type collectors that form the main collector area of this house are unusual in their construction. Instead of a single corrugated absorber plate with water flowing openly over it, these collectors have two: one nested into the other, with a tiny space (1/32 inch) between them. The heat-transfer water flows through this space, in [...]

In most climates, neither a heat pump nor a solar heating system can, by itself, provide all the heat a house needs.
Put the two together, and the heat pump can plumb the solar storage tank for heat, even when the tank’s liquid is much too cool for direct solar heating and the air outside is [...]