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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

Heating houses is a major energy suck. Behind passenger cars and trucking, it’s the largest energy draw in the United States. But it turns out homeowners looking to stay warm don’t need to rely just ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

When it comes to relying on solar energy to save on heating costs, Doug Stahl has always been a skeptic. He’s a practical, soft-spoken man who has been running school buildings for many years. But ...

Researchers from the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI) at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia have developed a new passive technology to keep solar panels cool. They claim their new tech can ...