Customer Reviews

Comfort in Any Climate

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

I love the concept of earth ships and have been infatuated with them for a good while. I thought I would start reading up and this is the first book I bought. I don't think this was the right first book for the subject. It was very brief and was more suited to be an "Earthship Calendar". They put it together quickly and made a few editing mistakes. Not terrible but I feel other books out there are better.

I have all M. Reynolds' other Earth Shelter books and this one has some great pictures and gives a short background on the Earth Shelters. This is a great "starter" book for anyone who thinks they might be interested in building an Earth Shelter. (I can't wait to get mine started!)

If you don't know what an Earthship is, this will astonish you. It's a true story of living in a structure of recycled materials, completely off the grid. There should be more of these.

good topic for discussion around a break room or sitting lounge. not extremely detailed on mechanics of an Earthship house (guess you have to buy a blueprint or get a contractor). well worth it if you want to be more environmentally involved.