Off-grid / Green Building & Sustainable Home Renovation Information & Advice

Is it worth insulating a home past building code requirements? There are probably only two general desires we share when imagining a dream house - we all want the nicest one possible for the least amount of money. And we want both of those things right away, rather than waiting a lifetime to see the 'payback' for noble...

...off-grid Tiny House in the woods. Armed with an appreciation for the great outdoors and a desire to learn to live off-grid, he bought 40 acres in the Sierras where he could do just that. After five years of hard work, Basich had a beautiful and artfully designed tiny home, respecting the principles of the golden ratio ...

...off-grid and uses a fraction of the water as the next most efficient machine on the market. Laundry machines for tiny houses and RVs Tiny house living, like off grid houses, have some additional challenges and sacrifices to make over grig powered homes, and manual powered laudry machines are a huge advantage. Water sys...

When considering solar cells as thin as laminate and completely transparent, the possibilities seem endless. Imagine every glass or laminant surface in our built environment and all of our devices, large and small, harvesting solar energy. In a world of passive, self-sustaining mini-power stations, would the need for f...

...off-grid watermakers and sustainable desalination. For those interested in permaculture and natural building, heating with a rocket stove fits perfectly with the ethos of using local, renewable resources efficiently.    

A resilient home for sustainability Northern Quebec isn’t a place where one might expect to look for a model of resilience. It’s bone-chilling cold in the winter with 10,450 heating degree days per year (Fahrenheit degree-days, base 65°F); there isn’t all that much sunlight in the winter, and Quebec—let alone northern ...

...off-grid LEED Gold passively-heated home. See post 1 of the off-grid homes blog here . or post 3 in the off-grid homes blog here.  This off-grid home design began with the basic principles of passive heating and cooling - invest in really good windows, face as many of them south as you can to gain heat, and install hea...

Along with its unprecedented achievements, the Kenogami House continues to act as a laboratory for resilient, cold climate building practices. Through software energy modeling it was determined that the Kenogami House would likely require 14.6 kWh of heat per square metre per year, but its actual performance seems to b...

Three years ago, professor Lucas Brown’s students in Green Mountain College’s Renewable Energy and Ecological Design (REED) class built a custom-designed tiny house, a 96-square-foot structure with a sleeping loft “upstairs” and a 300-watt solar powered electrical system. This semester, his class went one better, con...

We found this video at Whole Systems Design, a New England based company who identify, design, and develop human habitats. In their own words from their website : "We design and implement regenerative food, fuel, and shelter systems that operate on current solar energy. These are homesteads, farms and schools fit for a...

The most resilient house in North America The first house designed under our Passive Solar Index (PSI) program won "Most Resilient House" in the 2013 Green Builder® Home of the Year Awards. The Kenogami House is a living laboratory of high performance design and technology, called "The Most Resilient House in North Ame...