Switch to solar with a system built for you. Solar water heaters work by absorbing sunlight in solar collectors and saving the heated water in a storage tank. Both active and passive solar water ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

Dear Jim: I want to become more green and my children are all for it. From what I have read, using a solar water heater makes the most sense. I don't have much money for one. How can we build a simple ...

Even diehard Instagrammers admit it: Sometimes the best design is in what you don’t see. Such is the case with passive solar design, an approach to building that—in a nutshell—uses a house’s site, ...

Transpired solar air collector technology, developed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) back in the 1990s, recently found its way back home and is ...

Switch to solar with a system built for you. There isn’t a strict definition for what makes a home "solar" — it just has to use energy from the sun in some capacity. If you’re building a new home, it ...

A nice hot shower can be an invigorating way to start your morning or the perfect end to a long day. Wouldn’t it be nice to enjoy those hot showers without having to worry about wasting energy or ...

P.S. I’m glad you mentioned insulation and glazing. We’ve been remodeling and recently upgraded these items, and it’s made a tremendous difference. Grist thanks its sponsors. Become one. To support ...

Jim Gagnepain calls it “the little bermed house on the prairie.” He and his wife, Stephanie, built their retirement home in eastern El Paso County. Jim, who has a background in electrical engineering, ...