By the way affordable is in the eye of the beholder, What may be affordable to
you is not to me.
Damn straight, Reverend.
The first Earth Day in the 1970s was embraced by the so-called
counterculture. The more entrepreneurial and creative people with almost
no budget [like us] used their imagination and sweat to retrofit and
build thousands of low-energy homes. If you're planning to build a new
house it's easier to design efficiency from the ground up, but "new"
materials then--Tyvek, metallic Mylar--were used in retrofits, as were
R-Max and Thermax polyisocyanurate [mostly nontoxic foam] insulation sheets.
If the "hippies" could do it on the cheap, so can you. Early guide was
The Food and Heat Producing Solar Greenhouse by Rick Fisher and Bill
Yanda. Mother Earth News has published thousands of inexpensive projects
for energy efficiency and alternative energy.
It's easier to find how-to info now with the Internet,
http://tinyurl.com/bqlblz, even through the DOE,
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/informationcenter/. If you can't afford to
buy it, build something youself with the help of friends, or in our
case, Amish neighbors. For those in the DC area, visit the solar open
house in Takoma Park, http://www.chesapeakeclimate.org/.
Just as we never let the lack of money keep us from traveling [see
Lonely Planet books], we also haven't allowed not having "enough" money
keep us from optimizing our energy use comfortably.
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