Solar Living Source Book – Read it for Free Online!

By Off Grid Ebert

Real Goods, publishers of the Solar Living Source Book, are offering this indispensable resource for free to anyone who wants to read it online. The book in paperback format normally sells for $35 in major book stores, but you can now get most of the information you would find in the book by going to Real Goods Solar (The solar electric installation arm of Real Goods) and browsing through the chapters in your spare time.

The free online version includes all of the great, heavy-duty content as the printed version, but does not include all of the pictures, diagrams and product suggestions that I find so useful in my print copy. You should go check ot the free online version and, if you like it, consider buying the print version as a reference manual and off-grid living yellow pages. The back of the printed book includes a lot of great reference items like a Friction Loss chart for water pumping, nominal pipe sizes vs actual oustide diameters for both steel and plastic pipes, deep cycle battery wiring diagrams, solar insolation maps, magnetic declination maps, etc…

Example Chapters:

Chapters like Relocalization and Ecological Economics can be a little rambling, if not preachy, but by the time you get to Green Building Materials you’ve entered the meaty section of the book with lots of great information about living “the better” life. More than anything, however, you’ll find one of the most detailed books around for non-professional solar electric, solar heating and passive solar enthusiasts.

As of this post, it looks like only the first two sections of the book are online, but they have a “coming soon” holder for the other sections, which I take as meaning the entire book will be available online for free in due time.

Don’t forget to tell your blog readers and friends about this freebie! If it weren’t for my friends at Real Goods I wouldn’t have known about it either.