[.uk] Energy-Efficient Building (Best of Fine Homebuilding) (ISBN 1561583405)

Practical energy savings:
I found this book beneficial. I believe that people doing either new construction or remodelling will find it helpful. It covers new ideas as well some often overlooked but simple, inexpensive methods that should be used in all construction. In particular, the first chapter is about energy efficiancy in general and performing an energy audit on your house to see where the energy is wasted or lost. For the price of this book, even if you only used one idea from the book, you would more than pay for the book in energy savings in one heating/cooling season. My reason for not giving 5 stars is, "There should even more ideas included in this book!"

I have two issues with this book:
Okay, I'll confess I don't own this book, but there are two reasons I wouldn't buy it, and each one knocks a star off my rating: 1. This book seems a little old for this particular topic. Energy efficiency is an increasingly important issue in home building, and the various materials and technologies continue to evolve. There have been some advancements in the eight years since this book was compiled, and since it's a "best of," that means the articles in it are even older. I want the latest information available as I research this topic. 2. Based on the table of contents, the book seems targeted toward saving energy in colder climates. I live in central Florida where we air condition most of the year. Our biggest concerns here are keeping the heat out, not in, and controlling the humidity (which is 91% outside as I write this) inside your home. This dictates doing some things differently here, and chapters on topics like fixing a cold, drafty house, preventing ice dams, and building an efficient fireplace just aren't applicable here. ;-)

Excellent overview of cutting edge energy efficient building technique:
This book is really a book. It is a collection of magazine articles from a well respected building magazine that cover different building techniques. One chapter per article. There is an article for every currently used, but not quite mainstream building technique to improve energy efficiency of a home. Since the articles are written independently and were later compiled into a book, there is no comparison and contrast between techniques. Since the articles are very well written and go into depth on each technique, then comparisons between similar techniques can be extrapolated out, but some things like cost comparisons may be difficult to gather from the articles alone. Overall a very good overview of what is out there and working in practice today.