*** VIDEO SERIES INCLUDED WITH BOOK *** "From an authoritative source, this book provides both information and inspiration for how to make your home part of the solution to our great climate crisis. It will get you thinking - and then get you moving ahead!" -Bill McKibben, Author of The End of Nature If you spend more than $500 a year for utilities then this book is for you! Follow the design and building of four Net Zero homes, learn and understand the simple principles they use to make their houses so comfortable and affordable. About the Author: "Wes is very enthusiastic and passionate about his work. Together, with his dedication to energy efficient building practices and his understanding of the practical obstacles builders face result in a better product for consumers in New Hampshire." AN - NH Public Utilities Commission "His insight into the complex issues associated with the entire energy field is an extreme asset to the task at hand. He approaches everything with a respect for the history of how the energy field has evolved and with measured reflection of the future." TG - Lakes Region Community College "Wes has a knack for making complex material easy for us non-science people to understand" Student - LRCC What Homeowners are saying about their net-zero homes: "The most comfortable house I have ever lived in. It Is comfortable year round." MM - Newmarket, NH "I haven't had a sinus headache since I moved in." RH - Canterbury, NH "My wife used to have six asthma attacks a year. She hasn't had any in the two and a half years we've lived here." JB - Barrington, NH "We've spent under $1500 for utilities in the past two years and got more than $600 back from renewable energy credits." KH - Canterbury, NH Whether you own your own home or are thinking of building or renovating, this book and video series is packed with practical ideas for you that work. TheEnergyGeek.org

Cool Homes in Hot Places showcases real homes from the hottest territories around the world. Featuring a wide variety of environments and styles—from wilderness to hillside, from waterside to woodside, and from cultivated to streetside—this book shows how careful decisions around layout, materials, color, and furniture can create elegant yet functional and comfortable spaces in even the world's hottest climates. By designing each home holistically and taking into consideration all of the factors that impact the site—the occupants, region, climate, terrain, culture, and resources—Cool Homes in Hot Places will show any architect, interior designer, or homeowner the key to staying cool in any warm climate.

This book does more than just explain the benefits of low-energy dwellings (lower power bills and more comfortable surroundings) and how average Australians can achieve them. It inspires and encourages the reader with examples of beautiful and comfortable homes that are energy-efficient and immensely livable. Illustrated throughout with photos, sketches and plans (including a colour section), all the examples are Australian from all our different climatic zones.

"Provides valuable advice, illustrated by more than 100 inspiring contemporary examples of low-energy housing design, to help keep our homes cool in summer and warm in winter with little or no cooling and heating by appliances." - cover.

Revised and Expanded Edition - Includes CD-ROM with Custom Design Software For the past ten years The Passive Solar House has offered proven techniques for building homes that heat and cool themselves, using readily available materials and methods familiar to all building contractors and many do-it-yourself homeowners. True to this innovative, straightforward approach, the new edition of this best-selling guide includes CSOL passive solar design software, making it easier than ever to heat your home with the power of the sun. Since The Passive Solar House was first published, passive solar construction expert James Kachadorian has perfected user-friendly, Windows-compatible software to supplement the design process explained in the book by allowing homeowners/designers to enter the specifications of their design and see how changing a variable will affect its energy efficiency. This is the building book for a world of climbing energy costs. Applicable to diverse regions, climates, budgets, and styles of architecture, Kachadorian's techniques translate the essentials of timeless solar design into practical wisdom for today's solar builders. Profiles of successful passive solar design, construction, and retrofit projects from readers of the first edition provide inspiration to first-time homebuilders and renovators alike.

Positive energy homes enable people to live healthy and comfortable lives with energy left over to share. Creating a house you love that produces surplus energy is surprisingly easy with a thorough understanding of how buildings work and careful attention to detail in construction. The Passive House standard, with its well-proven track record, forms the basis for creating positive energy homes. This book explores the Passive House ‘fabric first’ approach, as well as the science and practicalities of effective ventilation strategies, smart options for heating and cooling, daylight harvesting, and efficient lighting and appliances. Positive Energy Homes provides home owners world-wide, architects and builders with an understanding of the principles and technical details of building these houses.

Improved housing conditions can save lives, prevent disease, increase quality of life, reduce poverty, and help mitigate climate change. Housing is becoming increasingly important to health in light of urban growth, ageing populations and climate change. The WHO Housing and health guidelines bring together the most recent evidence to provide practical recommendations to reduce the health burden due to unsafe and substandard housing. Based on newly commissioned systematic reviews, the guidelines provide recommendations relevant to inadequate living space (crowding), low and high indoor temperatures, injury hazards in the home, and accessibility of housing for people with functional impairments. In addition, the guidelines identify and summarize existing WHO guidelines and recommendations related to housing, with respect to water quality, air quality, neighbourhood noise, asbestos, lead, tobacco smoke and radon. The guidelines take a comprehensive, intersectoral perspective on the issue of housing and health and highlight co-benefits of interventions addressing several risk factors at the same time. The WHO Housing and health guidelines aim at informing housing policies and regulations at the national, regional and local level and are further relevant in the daily activities of implementing actors who are directly involved in the construction, maintenance and demolition of housing in ways that influence human health and safety. The guidelines therefore emphasize the importance of collaboration between the health and other sectors and joint efforts across all government levels to promote healthy housing. The guidelines' implementation at country-level will in particular contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals on health (SDG 3) and sustainable cities (SDG 11). WHO will support Member States in adapting the guidelines to national contexts and priorities to ensure safe and healthy housing for all.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic about a young girl growing up in Chicago • Acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. “Cisneros draws on her rich [Latino] heritage...and seduces with precise, spare prose, creat[ing] unforgettable characters we want to lift off the page. She is not only a gifted writer, but an absolutely essential one.” —The New York Times Book Review The House on Mango Street is one of the most cherished novels of the last fifty years. Readers from all walks of life have fallen for the voice of Esperanza Cordero, growing up in Chicago and inventing for herself who and what she will become. “In English my name means hope,” she says. “In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting." Told in a series of vignettes—sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes joyous—Cisneros’s masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery and one of the greatest neighborhood novels of all time. Like Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street or Toni Morrison’s Sula, it makes a world through people and their voices, and it does so in language that is poetic and direct. This gorgeous coming-of-age novel is a celebration of the power of telling one’s story and of being proud of where you're from.

This New York Times bestselling book is filled with hundreds of fun, deceptively simple, budget-friendly ideas for sprucing up your home. With two home renovations under their (tool) belts and millions of hits per month on their blog YoungHouseLove.com, Sherry and John Petersik are home-improvement enthusiasts primed to pass on a slew of projects, tricks, and techniques to do-it-yourselfers of all levels. Packed with 243 tips and ideas—both classic and unexpected—and more than 400 photographs and illustrations, this is a book that readers will return to again and again for the creative projects and easy-to-follow instructions in the relatable voice the Petersiks are known for. Learn to trick out a thrift-store mirror, spice up plain old roller shades, "hack" your Ikea table to create three distinct looks, and so much more.