Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

You’ll start by identifying green materials and sizing up potential systems and construction sites. You’ll weigh the pros and cons of popular green building methods and identify opportunities for saving money in the long run. Need to find some green professionals to assist you in your venture? We’ll help you do that, too. This book will also help you discover how to:

• Understand the lifecycle of building materials
• Choose the right system for your green building project
• Put together a green team
• Work within your budget
• Use green building methods and sustainable systems
• Speed construction and reduce energy use and waste
• Refinish old fixtures and materials
• Beware of asbestos and lead-paint hazards
• Avoid costly mistakes

Complete with lists of ten green things to do on every project and ten things you can do right now in your home in order to go green, Green Building & Remodeling For Dummies is your one-stop guide to planning and building the home you’ve always wanted.

Average Customer Rating:

Excellent overall review of green building	Customer Rating:
A great book to have in your library if you are interested in sustainable building. Excellent overview of all of the different aspects to consider. It did leave out any discussion of log construction.

Green building for dummies

Customer Rating:

A comprehensive run over all the options when building new or remodelling a house and wanting to be "greener". Provides most of the sustainable info you need, and would help for future house rating schemes as much of the content structure seems to be geared around LEED. A possible fault is too much detail on alternative technologies (e.g. straw houses) which the vast majority of even green obesssives will never use. Good for reference or just dipping. As a non-American I found it a bit US-centric but not so as to effect its relevance.

Pretty good book.	Customer Rating:
This book has a lot of great ideas, however it has a very strong bias in certain areas such as wind energy being very poor cost efficient method of energy production. It goes in to depth about solar panels and offers alot of great ideas for cheap energy efficient housing ideas way above and beyond the average methods.

A brief comment

Customer Rating:

I have a number of the Dummies books on various topics, and had an interest in how one might "green" an existing home, or build a new one. One thing I learned recently is that 50% of the energy lost from a typical house is due to poor building insulation, and that's one area in which most houses, depending on where in the U.S. they're built, could be improved. Since we wanted to beef up our house's insulation, we had a type of insulation installed that was more green than the other choices, and that is equally effective. If you're building a house from scratch, this book has a lot more information on many other topics relating to green building, including materials, construction, design ideas, energy saving tips and ideas, and many more topics on the subject.

Excellent Book

Customer Rating:

Green architect Eric Corey Freed knows his stuff and it shows in Green Building and Remodeling for Dummies. Freed makes green building and remodeling approachable and very doable. I like the checklists throughout the book and the perfect green rooms, both of which make understanding the big picture easy. Freed does an excellent job in explaining the advantages of building green for the health of the occupants and the environment. If you've ever wondered what the true environmental cost of a particular product is, Freed does a great job of explaining it in "the life cycle of materials from cradle to grave." If you didn't "get" greeen before, this section will show you how important it is to look at the entire life cycle of a product to determine how green--or not--a particular product is. I also liked the handy list of green material substitutes which make purchasing very easy. The book was very readable and concise and even fun to read. I highly recommend it. By the author of the award winning book, Harmonious Environment: Beautify, Detoxify and Energize Your Life, Your Home and Your Planet