Free Heat: How Buildings Can Warm Themselves Using Sunlight, Mass & Earth: 8 (UK Building Regulations) - Tapa blanda

Sinopsis

What if your home could warm itself, using nothing but sunlight, stone, and earth?

FREE HEAT is a practical, authoritative guide to passive heating, written by a building regulations and energy assessment consultant with more than twenty years of professional experience. It is the book for homeowners, self-builders, renovators, and designers who want to reduce heating bills, lower their carbon footprint, and create homes that work with nature rather than against it.

Rising energy costs are not going away. But the frustration of paying ever more to heat a poorly designed building is, at least in part, avoidable. The principles behind FREE HEAT are not experimental. They were understood by Persian, Roman, Korean, and Scandinavian builders centuries before the first boiler was installed. This book recovers that wisdom, grounds it in modern building science, and makes it usable today.

David G. Oldham draws on lived experience of thick-walled Norman farmhouses, where residual solar warmth lingers on cool autumn evenings long after the sun has moved on, to bring the technical subject to life. That quality, a room that holds the day's heat quietly and releases it through the night, is not accidental. It is designed. And it can be designed again, in new builds and careful renovations, with the right knowledge and the right priorities. From direct solar gain and thermal mass to Trombe walls, earth sheltering, phase-change materials, and roof design, every major passive heating strategy is explained clearly and honestly, including its limitations.

Inside FREE HEAT you will find:

• A sweeping historical survey of vernacular passive heating from ancient civilisations to contemporary low-energy construction
• Clear explanations of building physics, thermal mass, and solar geometry for readers without an engineering background
• An honest assessment of overheating risks and how to design against them
• Guidance on orientation, glazing ratios, shading devices, and the subtle interplay between insulation and thermal mass in UK and maritime climates
• A practical case study walking through a complete passive design from site analysis to expected performance
• A room-by-room guide that turns principles into specific, actionable decisions

This is not a promotional text. It does not promise effortless warmth without compromise. It is a balanced, professionally grounded resource that respects the reader's intelligence and acknowledges the realities of cloudy skies, variable occupancy, and retrofit constraints. The goal is not perfection. It is progress, the kind that shows up on energy bills, in comfort levels, and in the long-term resilience of a building.

The stakes are real. A poorly oriented extension, an under-insulated floor slab, or a glazed roof that overheats in summer and haemorrhages heat in winter, these are costly mistakes that last for decades. Passive design, applied thoughtfully, avoids them. It also creates spaces that feel genuinely different to live in: warmer in texture and atmosphere as well as temperature, quieter, more stable, less dependent on mechanical systems that break down and cost money to run.

FREE HEAT is ideal for readers who enjoy technically rigorous but accessible writing on sustainable building, eco-home design, and low-energy architecture. Fans of works by the Centre for Alternative Technology, the Passivhaus Trust, and writers such as Lloyd Alter or Alex Wilson will find this book a welcome addition to their shelf. If you are planning a self-build, a major renovation, or simply want to understand how thoughtful design can replace expensive energy, this book gives you the knowledge to make genuinely better decisions.

Outsmart the energy system. Build smarter from the start.

This description was created with the assistance of AI and reviewed by the author.

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