Comfort in Any Climate

Rating:
Summary: Comfort In Any Climate
Review: Comfort in Any Climate is an introduction to building your own home using passive solar techniques. The book is not intended to be the book to end all books, in fact it is an introduction that gets one thinking about how different climates affect the performance of any dwelling. No one cookie-cutter formula will work for different situations (Latitude, Altitude, Micro-climate, etc.) and this book gets one thinking about how to adapt a design to a given area based on narrowing down specific paramaters. It is not intended for Rocket Scientists, it is more for people who are new to natural and sustainable building, and wish to pursue their education in learning how to properly pick a building location so that they will be in a better position to make sensible choices that lead to asking the right questions of what design will work best on their chosen building site. This is a good place to start. The three original earthship books are more "one size fits all" and this book will add to knowing how to modify the "one size fits all" mentality so that a comfortably dwelling can be constructed.

Rating:
Summary: Comfort In Any Climate
Review: Comfort in Any Climate is an introduction to building your own home using passive solar techniques. The book is not intended to be the book to end all books, in fact it is an introduction that gets one thinking about how different climates affect the performance of any dwelling. No one cookie-cutter formula will work for different situations (Latitude, Altitude, Micro-climate, etc.) and this book gets one thinking about how to adapt a design to a given area based on narrowing down specific paramaters. It is not intended for Rocket Scientists, it is more for people who are new to natural and sustainable building, and wish to pursue their education in learning how to properly pick a building location so that they will be in a better position to make sensible choices that lead to asking the right questions of what design will work best on their chosen building site. This is a good place to start. The three original earthship books are more "one size fits all" and this book will add to knowing how to modify the "one size fits all" mentality so that a comfortably dwelling can be constructed.

Rating:
Summary: Skip This One
Review: This book talks about insulation, space, and mass and the need
to "tune" a house to benefit from free heat/cooling. HOWEVER,
it never mentions a single tuning formula. Unless you plan on
building many homes to "tune" your designs, this is only a book
on common sense and you'ld be better off with Reynolds' other
books or another book on this topic by another author.