Appropriate Technology

Read free. "'Passive' solar heating and cooling does not depend on pumps or fans or any other devices. Instead, it relies on the natural ebb and flow of the energy of the sun through a house. With a few facts from this book and a little common sense, you can combine passive solar design with energy conservation and reduce the heating and cooling bills for a new house to less than 15% of those for conventional houses. And many of the ideas can be adapted to existing houses as well." ...

Read free. "As for the book's title, 'Soft Tech' is a term we've used and defended since the late sixties. It first emerged in Great Britain but then dropped out of fashion to be replaced by Alternative Technology (AT) and Appropriate Technology (AT).... 'Soft' signifies that something is alive, resilient, adaptive, maybe even lovable...." ...

Read free. "Representing every major natural building technique, and written by some of the most prominent innovators and advocates in the field, this collection ... this book is far more than just a survey of techniques. It provides a philosophical framework for the entire natural building movement, as well as a set of design principles broadly applicable to ecological design projects everywhere. Our goal is a whole systems approach to natural building." ...

"The vision of Open Source Ecology is a world of collaborative design – for a transparent and inclusive economy of abundance.... OSE is currently developing a set of open source blueprints for the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) – a set of the 50 most important machines that it takes for modern life to exist – everything from a tractor, to an oven, to a circuit maker. In the process of creating the GVCS, OSE intends to develop a modular, scalable platform for documenting and developing open source, libre hardware – including blueprints for both physical artifacts and for related open enterprises." Innovative Seed Eco Homes project ...

A sustainability wiki started in 2006 as an encyclopedia of appropriate technology. Now it also documents over 3,000 projects. It also provides curated collections of some of its most notable content, such as The Future We Deserve ...

"Traditional buildings were designed according to the microclimate of the specific region because heat and cold control the thermal comfort in the houses and this different from one place to another. The natural technologies applied in these buildings have sustained human life for many decades and are purely for heating or cooling purpose. Examples of these techniques are fire chimneys, courtyards, wind towers and mashrabiya (Noble, 2007). In hot-dry and warm humid zones such as Middle East and North Africa where cooling is more important than heating, ventilation tunnel, wind tower, wind catcher, wind sail, maziara and courtyard are used to achieve thermal comfort." ...