Green Home Building

GreenHomeBuilding_Cook_GarrettAuthor(s):  Miki Cook & Doug Garrett

Publisher: New Society

ISBN: 9780865717794

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According to conventional wisdom, building a green home is an expensive endeavor. The standard approach treats green as an add-on, tacking “premium” products, finishes and equipment onto a traditional home design. As a result, many green home projects end up over budget or fail to achieve their environmental and performance goals.

Green Home Building explodes the myth that green homes have to cost more. Using proven methods based on applied building science, the authors show how to:

  • Lower base construction costs to provide funding for high performance upgrades
  • Achieve a net zero energy home, including “zero-ing” water, waste, carbon and associated costs within fifteen years
  • Live affordably into the future, despite anticipated rising costs for fuel, water, materials, taxes and health care.

This comprehensive guide to building green on any budget defines the strategies that maximize the return on green investments. Written for anyone who has ever been swayed by the argument that the price tag limits how green a home can be, Green Home Building is a must-read for builders, contractors, architects, designers and homeowners.

 

Building for Energy Independence: Sun/Earth Buffering and Superinsulation

Sun/Earth Buffering and Superinsulation: Building for Energy Independence

Building for Energy Independence: Sun/Earth Buffering and SuperinsulationAuthor(s): Don Booth, Jonathan Booth, Peg Boyles

Publisher: Rodale Pr (September 1984)

Paperback:
ISBN: 0960442235
ISBN-13: 978-0960442232
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Hardbound:
ISBN-10: 0960442243
ISBN-13: 978-0960442249
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Back in 1983 Don Booth’s company, Community Builders was one of the premier developers of energy efficient homes in New England. This privately published book was probably written to help prospective customer’s understand the technology and boost sales. No matter what his reason, Don’s book became a classic of the genre. Calling upon his experience, he goes step-by-step through the theory and practice of building super insulated and passive solar/geothermal homes. The explanations are clear, the examples are informative and it provides just the right amount of technical detail. If you are planning to build a new home, read this book first. The principles you learn here will save you thousands of heating and cooling dollars. It has already saved me from a very expensive mistake.

Unlike most books on this topic, you can actually read this book without stunning your brain. Instead of bulking up the book with endless pages of sun elevation charts or conversion tables, Don includes twenty ‘reviews’ of solar/geothermal homes by their owners, designers and builders. These vary from the comic to the insane as the early pioneers struggle to build their dream homes. Some of these stories would make good movies. My personal favorite is the lady who lives in a tent on the site while her home is built. We watch with dismay as construction delays move completion deep into the cold New England winter. Finally, she moves gleefully into the shell while waiting for the windows, only to have her children complain that the tent was warmer. Who says we can’t learn from the mistakes of others.

The Hand-Sculpted House: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to Building a Cob Cottage

The Hand-Sculpted House: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to Building a Cob Cottage

The Hand-Sculpted House: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to Building a Cob CottageAuthor(s): Ianto Evans, Michael G. Smith, and Linda Smiley

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Company

Paperback: 346 pages

ISBN: 1890132349

ISBN-13: 978-1890132347

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The Hand-Sculpted House A Practical and Philosophical Guide to Building a Cob Cottage by Ianto Evans, Michael G. Smith, and Linda Smiley This is the long awaited full strength cob building book! Lots of detailed information, color photos and great descriptions on how to build every aspect of a cob house. Recommended!

Publishers description: Are you ready for the Cob Cottage? This is a building method so old and so simple that it has been all but forgotten in the rush to synthetics. A Cob Cottage, however, might be the ultimate expression of ecological design, a structure so attuned to its surroundings that its creators refer to it as “an ecstatic house.”

The authors build a house the way others create a natural garden. They use the oldest, most available materials imaginable — earth, clay, sand, straw, and water — and blend them to redefine the future (and past) of building. Cob (the word comes from an Old English root, meaning “lump”) is a mixture of non-toxic, recyclable, and often free materials. Building with cob requires no forms, no cement, and no machinery of any kind. Builders actually sculpt their structures by hand. Building with earth is nothing new to America; the oldest structures on the continent were built with adobe bricks. Adobe, however, has been geographically limited to the Southwest. The limits of cob are defined only by the builder’s imagination.

Cob has been a traditional building process for millennia in Europe, even in rainy and windy climates like the British Isles, where many cob buildings still serve as family homes after hundreds of years. The technique is newly arrived to the Americas, and, as with so many social trends, the early adopters are in the Pacific Northwest.

Cob houses (or cottages, since they are always efficiently small by American construction standards) are not only compatible with their surroundings, they ARE their surroundings, literally rising up from the earth. They are full of light, energy-efficient, and cozy, with curved walls and built-in, whimsical touches. They are delightful. They are ecstatic.

The Hand-Sculpted House is theoretical and philosophical, but intensely practical as well. You will get all the how-to information to undertake a cob building project. As the modern world rediscovers the importance of living in sustainable harmony with the environment, this book is a bible of radical simplicity.

About the Authors
Ianto Evans is an applied ecologist, landscape architect, inventor, and teacher with building experience on six continents. Cob is traditional in his homeland, Wales. In addition to teaching ecological building, Ianto has consulted with USAID, the World Bank, the Peace Corps, and several national governments. Michael G. Smith teaches practical workshops and consults on cob construction, natural building, and permaculture. He is the author of The Cobber’s Companion: How to Build Your Own Earthen Home and co-editor of The Art of Natural Building: Design, Construction, Resources. Linda Smiley teaches workshops on cob, sculpting sacred spaces, intuitive design, and natural plasters and finishes. With a background as a recreational therapist, she specializes in helping people use natural building as a tool for personal transformation and healing.

Ceramic Houses and Earth Architecture: How to Build Your Own

Ceramic Houses and Earth Architecture: How to Build Your Own

Ceramic Houses and Earth Architecture: How to Build Your OwnAuthor(s): Nader Khalili

Publisher: Cal-Earth Press

Paperback: 233 pages

ISBN: 1889625019

ISBN-13: 978-1889625010

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Reprint Edition

Paperback Publication date: September 1996

How to build, step by step, an adobe and ceramic architecture that is affordable and self-help. How to build arches, vaults, domes, and utilize the natural energy of wind, sun-and-shade to help save forests and create a sustainable architecture. How to fire and glaze an entire building after it is constructed from clay-earth on site. A NEW UPDATE CHAPTER introducing the Superadobe technology, building with almost any on-site soil using sandbags and barbed wire.

Internationally renowned architect Nader Khalili, creator of the ‘Superadobe’ earth bag style of building shows step-by-step how to construct, glaze, and fire adobe and rammed earth buildings.

His message…told in a haunting mix of prose and poetry, of memory and idealism…is that we can teach the poor to build their own homes even though they have access to nothing more than dirt and community kilns.
— Fessenden Review

This is an extraordinary work. Though very much the personal expression of an impassioned visionary, Ceramic Houses is full of experiential advice, technical guidance, and encouragement to those who would join the author in his search for cheap, durable, attainable housing for much of the world.
— Fine Homebuilding

Build an Extreme Green Hot Water Solar Collector

Build an Extreme Green Hot Water Solar Collector

Build an Extreme Green Hot Water Solar CollectorAuthor: Phillip Rastocny

Format: Kindle Edition

File Size: 836 KB

ASIN: B0043EWW7S

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These instructions describe how to build a passive solar hot water collector using your existing hot water heater. This solar collector uses no pumps or additional electricity to operate and assembled without pipe bending. The instructions include a complete materials list with prices and part numbers from a large well known hardware store.

The Second Edition adds a solar-powered pump solution when collector positioing, long pipe runs, or other issues do not permit proper thermo-siphoning. Also included is a new appendix for troubleshooting common issues, and small changes in the text body with new illustrations to further clarify some of the existing steps.

This is an advanced project that requires good skills in silver soldering and custom plumbing fabrication.

The Small Adobe House

The Small Adobe House

The Small Adobe House

Authors: Agnesa Reve, Robert Reck (photographer)

Publisher: Gibbs Smith; First Edition edition (July 18, 2001)

Hardcover: 76 pages

ISBN-10: 1586850652

ISBN-13: 978-1586850654

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Building or remodeling an adobe house is an artistic endeavor, with all the satisfaction–and occasional frustration–of any artistic effort. But once you’ve lived sheltered by adobe wall, you won’t want anything else. Whether the small adobe house is a work of art or a model of simplicity, it is by far the most appropriate house for the Southwest. The adobe serves as natural insulation, keeping the interior cool in summer and warm in winter, and muffling noise. No draft ever penetrates an adobe wall. The spaces of such a house accept with equal grace the basic curve of an Eames chair or the sumptuous gilding of Louis XIV. It is an easy house to live in. It is also easy to reshape. You may incorporate all sorts of modern ideas and still keep the classic look of the small adobe house, affording enjoyment of the newest conveniences within an enveloping tradition.

Adobe Houses for Today: Flexible Plans for Your Adobe Home

Adobe Houses for Today: Flexible Plans for Your Adobe Home

Adobe Houses for Today: Flexible Plans for Your Adobe Home

Author(s): Laura and Alex Sanchez

Publisher: Sunstone Press; Revised edition (April 9, 2008)

Paperback: 230 pages

ISBN-10: 0865346623

ISBN-13: 978-0865346628

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Since Adobe Houses for Today first appeared, interest in energy efficiency has exploded. Showing the pathway to smaller, solar tempered, easy-to-heat homes using adobe, one of the world’s most energy efficient building materials, makes this book about adobe houses not only for today, but also for tomorrow. Adobe Houses for Today features 12 plans for compact, beautifully proportioned adobe homes in modern and traditional styles. The richly illustrated text shows how the basic houses, designed for today’s smaller families, can be expanded and adapted to fit readers’ own budgets, family sizes, style preferences, and building sites. After a brief look at adobe’s rich history, Adobe Houses for Today surveys adobe’s advantages as a building material, illustrates adobe construction, and gives an eye-opening tour through the facts and fantasies of energy conservation. The heart of the book details the plans, using them as examples of design techniques that increase livability and control costs in any house. The book and its minimal-cost construction drawings are valuable, enjoyable tools for those buying, building, or remodeling a house. With this new edition, which includes an additional chapter with stories from people who have built the houses, construction drawings are now available for some of the expanded versions.

Adobe Houses for Today features 12 plans for compact, beautifully-proportioned adobe homes in modern and traditional styles. Yet the book offers much more. The richly-illustrated text shows how the basic houses, designed for today’s smaller families, can be as flexible as a set of building blocks. Intriguing drawings demonstrate how readers can expand and adapt the plans to fit their own budgets, family sizes, style preferences, and building sites.

After a brief look at adobe’s rich history, Adobe Houses for Today surveys adobe’s advantages as a building material. Next, readers take an eye-opening tour through the facts and fantasies of energy conservation. Then, the heart of the book illustrates the basic and expanded versions of the plans, using them as examples of design techniques that increase livability and control costs in any house. The book also explains site requirements, adobe construction, and estimating basics with an adobe house that “assembles itself.” Adobe Houses for Today and its associated construction drawings are valuable, enjoyable tools not only for those buying, building, or remodeling a house, but also for contractors, drafters, drafting teachers, and real estate professionals.

Award-winning author Laura Sanchez previously ran a drafting business that specialized in adobe houses. She called it quits sometime after the 250th set of plans, but maintains an abiding interest in designing the very best, most cost-effective houses possible. Alex Sanchez, who grew up building houses, has taught courses in adobe construction and solar energy. He founded and currently heads the renowned computer-aided drafting program at the University of New Mexico-Valencia Campus. The authors’ previous books and CDs concern architectural computer graphics.

 

 

Solar Radiation and Daylight Models for the Energy Efficient Design of Buildings

Solar Radiation and Daylight Models for the Energy Efficient Design of Buildings

Solar Radiation and Daylight Models for the Energy Efficient Design of Buildings

Author(s): H. Kambezidis, Tariq Muneer, Peter Tregenza

Publisher: Architectural Press (September 29, 1997)

Paperback: 224 pages

ISBN: 0750624957

ISBN-13: 978-0750624954

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Book & Cd-Rom Edition

This book and CD Rom package provides an accessible, user-friendly database on daylight design data. With the boom in interest in energy-efficiency and solar design, it provides a valuable source for architects and engineers.

It describes models which can be used to provide essential data at any place in the world. These models are included on a disk to ease the task of the architect or engineers. The authors show how these models can be applied to the energy efficient design of buildings.

‘The value of this book is that an expert in the subject has made a personal selection of applicable formulae, and presented them in a comprehensive and consistent format, both on paper and in the form of computer programs. Books such as this are indispensable references for the research worker and for the practising engineer.’
Peter Tregenza, The University of Sheffield

The Passive Solar House: Using Solar Design to Heat and Cool Your Home

The Passive Solar House: Using Solar Design to Heat and Cool Your Home

The Passive Solar House: Using Solar Design to Heat and Cool Your Home

Author(s): James Kachadorian

Publisher: Chelsea Green Pub Co

Paperback: 220 pages

ISBN: 0930031970

ISBN-13: 978-0930031978

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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.

Product Description

Finally there is a contemporary book that demonstrates the potential for heating and cooling a home with free energy. This new volume is a welcome addition to the canon of indispensable solar construction books, bringing fully up to date for the 1990s the legendary promise of 1970s-era solar pioneers: the promise of a home that heats and cools itself with minimal use of a back-up furnace.Whether you are adopting the model developed by Jim Kachadorian or using another designer’s layout and plan, The Passive Solar House will provide you with pragmatic, immediately applicable solar design advice that is usable in any region or climate. Information includes:
— Proper siting and strategic window selection and placement
— Energy and money-saving construction tips
— Ideal air-exchange rates, and ways to avoid overheating
— Methods for gauging and maximizing thermal mass
— Criteria for sizing of back-up heating systems
— Interior design for year-round comfort

This book is brimful of worthwhile, constructive how-to advice, and gives readers the basis for understanding the hows and whys of solar design, including a succinct presentation of ten key solar-design principles that have defined and guided solar architecture for thousands of years.

 

Card catalog description
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. Customer Comments bereznov@worldnet.att.net from Longmont, Colorado , 10/25/97, rating=9:
Passive solar design basics, formulae and needed databases An excellent book for the beginner in passive solar home design with a cookbook approach and worksheets to calculate the solar performance of you building design. Usefull tables needed for calculations are included but only for a limited number of localities. Based upon a sound, albiet more than 20 year old, approach to passive solar design. An easy to understand process for the design of a truely passive home with methods to determine the need for and cost of supplemental heat in many areas of the country. Principles throughout the book may be applied to other designs. A detailed explanation and instructions on building the solar slab. Well worth the price of admission!

Table of Contents
1. Let Nature Heat Your Home
2. The Passive Solar Concept
3. The Solar Slab and Basic Solar Design
4. Insulation, Venting, and Fresh Air
5. Basic Layouts and Floor Plans
6. How to Do the Solar Design Calculations
7. The Foundation Plan, and Backup Heating and Cooling
8. A Sidehill Variation, and Solar Design Worksheets
9. Sunspaces, and Special Design Considerations
10. Interior Design for Year-Round Comfort By Cornelia C. Kachadorian
App. 1. Solar Design Worksheets
App. 2. Solar Intensity and Solar Heat Gain Factors for 16 to 64 degrees North Latitude
App. 3. Thermal Properties of Typical Building and Insulating Materials (Design Values)
App. 4. North Latitude, Elevation, and Outside Winter Design Temperatures for Selected Cities in the U.S. and Canada
App. 5. Average Monthly and Yearly Degree Days for Cities in the U.S. and Canada
App. 6. Mean Percentage of Possible Sunshine for Selected Cities in the U.S. and Canada
App. 7. Isogonic Chart (Magnetic Declination)
Index

Small Houses (Great Houses)

Small Houses (Great Houses)

Small Houses (Great Houses)

Publisher: Taunton Press

Paperback: 160 pages

ISBN: 1561581062

ISBN-13: 978-1561581061

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Small Houses (Great Houses: Fine Homebuilding)

Paperback
September 1995
Color photos, floor plans.
160 pages

In these economically depressed times, which include a slumping housing market, how does one justify the appearance of another book on building a new home? This volume is the second in a three-book series made up of articles collected from 10 years of Fine Homebuilding . The 37 examples included here are carefully selected as the antidote for an industry in temporary decline. There’s more than a hint of a deliberate return to attitudes and concerns of the near past that were so smugly trashed in the ’80s: that small is better and that energy efficiency can help lead us to a more environmentally sound future. The shrinking availability and more effective use of space are pointedly addressed. The featured houses fit into modest plots of land, and are geared to suit the empty nesters, small families and singles, as well as the vacation or second home owner. The editors have assembled handsome and interesting design solutions that are stylistically American, from saltbox, barn and Victorian cottage to ranch house, urban studio apartment and cabin.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description

Small houses are less expensive to build, more energy efficient, and easier to maintain than big homes, but they don’t have to feel small. In this collection of 37 articles from FINE HOMEBUILDING magazine, you’ll find new houses, remodels, urban rowhouses, and guest cottages that double as work studios. A book full of practical design ideas and construction information that will help you realize just how beautiful small can be.