Customer Reviews

Basics of Energy Efficient Living: A Beginner's Guide to Alternative Energy and Home Energy Savings

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These days it seems that energy advice is available on every street corner--"turn down your thermostat", "caulk your house" or "buy a solar panel". Unfortunately, most of this "common sense" is either massively expensive or based on "cut back" and save. It's hardly inspiring or practical for real people.

This book restores my confidence in practical energy solutions. It's not "preachy" or "environmentalist"---it simply lays out how energy works and options to cut energy waste. It's easy to read, yet packed with information. I haven't seen technical writing this good in years.

The content is fairly evenly divided between discussions on preventing energy loss, recapturing lost energy, and obtaining "free" energy. The explanations are lucid, logical and cover the major energy options. The book also includes worksheets for calculating energy use in your own home.

Overall, what I appreciate most is this book doesn't preach/promote a specific energy solution. Instead it simply explains the options and lets you decide what will give you the most gain for your specific house/lifestyle. Once you read this book I guarantee you won't think about energy the same way again.

This book was pretty good and I'm glad I read it. But it wasn't really what I was looking for. Basically, it's a review of some of the basic math and physics behind energy. A few specific topics, like R-values, are covered in exhausting detail. There are a bunch of worksheets for calculating your heat loss and such, which take up a large part of the book.