Green Book Review: Renewable Energies for Your Home

I recently reviewed a new McGraw-Hill green home book – Renewable Energies for Your Home: Real-World Solutions for Green Conversions by Russel Gehrke; and overall I think it’s a good book for folks looking to create a more sustainable home that won’t cost you a fortune.

Basics:

From the publishers, “Renewable Energies for Your Home offers authoritative, practical, and fun do-it-yourself projects and tips for greening your home and car. Gehrke covers biodiesel, ethanol, CNG, hydrogen, electricity, waste vegetable oil, and biomass, and provides the following information for each fuel: how it works; its carbon footprint; efficiency; strengths; drawbacks; source; applications; a dabbler’s guide; and tips.”

Renewable Energies for Your Home covers:

• Energy savings and environmental benefits
• Biomass fuels, including biodiesel, ethanol, used fryer oil, and wood
• Producing your own biodiesel without titration
• Assembling a biolight grill and fire starter
• Making bioburn-a firewood substitute
• Wind turbines
• Solar lighting, heating, water heating, and electric generation
• Building a solar heat collector
• Creating a wind/solar hybrid electric system

What I thought:

The book professes to cover a lot of information in just 208 pages (including the index) so I was leery. But I was pleasantly surprised. Some highlights…

A nice intro about the author’s path to green. I like to know where green writers are coming from and Gehrke explains his stance well with personal stories. Many about vehicles, which actually don’t interest me all that much, but his writing (personable) kept my attention.

An excellent run down early in the book about our dependence on non-renewable energies, what we can do to become independent from non-renewable energy sources, and why economics play a key part in the energy and eco issues we face.

I like Gehrke’s positive take on why we need to embrace renewable energies (in Chapter 4 – The Shift to Renewables and Its Costs) and how by not embracing renewable energy we’re just stuck in a high cost cycle of non-renewable energy. He’s not preachy just matter of fact. He also notes that humans are directly in charge of their money and how they use it for energy, which is cool because a lot of people assume going green is so expensive but he explains about how we all make choices – a factor I’m on board with too.

Most of the book is divided into energy explanations and then projects related to said energy; such as Chapter 7, Wind Power (where to get it, how turbines work, systems, problems with wind power, and more). Then Chapter 8 covers Wind Projects for Homeowners i.e. a wind powered clothes dryer, or clothes line, but a super nice one, and the instructions to build it offer step-by-step tips and images.

Another example is Chapter 9 Solar Power (what’s up with solar) while Chapter 10 explains how to build a solar heat collector for inside the home. The book was heavy on biomass information and biomass projects which was neat because that’s a green topic I know less about than others, so it was cool to learn more. Two of the biomass projects included; biolight fire and grill starter and biodiesel without titration.

Bonus this is green book that’s actually, literally green and FSC certified. All pages were printed on acid-free paper that contain 100% post consumer fibers. I hate when green books are printed on virgin fibers (lame right).

Also included are easy human powered tips you can do at home to save energy and an excellent resource chapter with tons of renewable energy providers. The only downside was that I wished there would have been a few more projects included. This was a good intro to renewable energy projects, but it leaves you wanting to see a few more at least.

Overall I would recommend this book to homeowners looking to go green. Especially homeowners interested in renewable energies for money savings. None of the projects were too hard for beginning tree huggers, and information throughout the book was easy to follow.

See if your local library has this book or check out Renewable Energies for Your Home: Real-World Solutions for Green Conversions at McGraw-Hill.