Find the best solar options for your home and budget. Find the best solar options for your home and budget. Since ancient times, people have found ways to use the sun’s heat to stay warm or keep cool.

Even diehard Instagrammers admit it: Sometimes the best design is in what you don’t see. Such is the case with passive solar design, an approach to building that—in a nutshell—uses a house’s site, ...

Passive solar architecture is a design strategy that optimizes a building’s energy efficiency and long-term sustainability. By relying on a building site’s solar orientation and climate, sustainable ...

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 ...

There are some basic building principles that, when applied correctly, can greatly reduce the energy required to keep a home (or any building) warm in winter and cool in summer. Once applied, these ...

As their kids grew and began leaving the nest, Cathy and Barry Stamp started thinking about two dreams they’d had about a new house: one, to get something very sustainable, and two, to create ...

Trombe wall systems are an established passive solar design technology that utilises a massive wall with an external glazed façade to capture, store and gradually release solar energy. By absorbing ...

The reason that homebuilders don’t do passive-solar homes isn’t that they don’t work (passive works great). Rather, it’s because passive solar requires an architect to orient a home along the sun’s ...

EASTON — Being called “passive” isn’t usually interpreted as a compliment. But, in the case of the house at 28 Drewbarrie Lane, it could be. The 4,548-square-foot Cape Cod is a passive solar home, ...

Holographic optical elements (HOEs) are diffractive devices engineered through the recording of interference patterns in specialised photopolymer materials. Their ability to selectively modulate ...