Dear Jim: We have a large family and use much hot water. I cannot afford to have a solar water heating system installed, but I would like to make some type of solar water heater myself. What do you ...

Switch to solar with a system built for you. Since ancient times, people have found ways to use the sun’s heat to stay warm or keep cool. They built homes from clay and other materials that hold heat ...

As I discussed in last week’s column ("Resilience: Dramatically Better Building Envelopes," Jan. 4), a resilient home is extremely well-insulated, so that it can be kept warm with very little ...

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.

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 ...

Q. I feel the sun shining in a living room window and it's very warm. My budget is pretty tight, but I want to make or install something to capture that heat and lower my heating bills. What do you ...

Now that the winter solstice, the shortest daylight day of the year, is behind us I’m reminded of how important it is to let the sunshine into our lives. There are many benefits to having large ...

This second floor room takes advantage of the passive solar heat of the morning sun. ANA VENEGAS Fresno Custom Publications Photo When Chris Senior was in college in the ’70s, he was convinced energy ...

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 ...

If you have large, south-facing windows, you may already be using solar power in your house. If the windows turn a room into a sauna in the summer and a fridge in the winter, some touchups can lower ...

Following the first energy crisis in 1973 there was a rush to heat homes with the sun. It was a tinkerer's paradise, with all manner of solar heating systems migrating from garage workshops to ...