Following the first energy crisis in 1973 there was a rush to heat homes with the sun. It was a tinkerer's paradise, with all manner of solar heating systems migrating from garage workshops to ...

If you're building or renovating, passive solar design can make your house easier to keep comfortable. Our panel of experts ...

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 ...

It won't be long before winter hits us again, and I promised myself last year that we'd do what we could to our home to make it more comfortable this year. It stayed cold indoors all last winter, and ...

Solar energy is abundant and frustratingly ill-timed. A sunbeam can become either electricity (useful for running modern life ...

Heating houses is a major energy suck. Behind passenger cars and trucking, it’s the largest energy draw in the United States. But it turns out homeowners looking to stay warm don’t need to rely just ...

Now that the winter solstice, the shortest daylight day of the year, is behind us I’m reminded of how important it is to let the sunshine into our lives. There are many benefits to having large ...

Q. I feel the sun shining in a living room window and it's very warm. My budget is pretty tight, but I want to make or install something to capture that heat and lower my heating bills. What do you ...

Harvard engineers have built a solar harvester that automatically toggles between producing heat and generating electricity ...

When it comes to relying on solar energy to save on heating costs, Doug Stahl has always been a skeptic. He’s a practical, soft-spoken man who has been running school buildings for many years. But ...

Switch to solar with a system built for you. Solar water heaters work by absorbing sunlight in solar collectors and saving the heated water in a storage tank. Both active and passive solar water ...