Book Review – Eco House Manual by Nigel Griffiths

To those familiar with the popular Haynes range of car maintenance manuals, “Eco House Manual” by Nigel Griffiths will be both familiar and shocking. Gone are the rough pages with black and white photos of assembly activities and car parts, and in its place are glossy pages and colour illustrations.

In the same vein, this book moves on from the step-by-step guide to installing eco-technologies into your house. It takes a more wide-ranging view at all of the varied possibilities that a homeowner or developer can take to upgrade a dwelling to make it more energy sustainable.

Measure Once, measure again

I used to work in Aerospace Engineering and the site that I worked at was going through one of its many significant transitions. This normally resulted in either a call for volunteers to take early redundancy or that we’d won a contract and the profits were dependant upon a workflow that we weren’t used to.

One of the key characteristics of all of these times was the increase in activity that employed extra people to understand the statistics and their relationship to each other. I could never understand why this was the case until someone pointed out to me that in order to understand how efficient (or inefficient) a system is you have to understand what is going on.

Domestic Renewables

The use of renewable energy sources in the domestic home is something that has been available for years. The advantages of recycling rubbish, and composting old scraps of food is something that is as old as the hills. It is only recently however that the technology and public grants and incentives have coincided to allow domestic renewable energy gathering on an industrial scale.