Low-tech Magazine Volume II (2012-2018)

Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past and often forgotten technologies and how they can inform sustainable energy practices. Sometimes, past technologies can be copied without any changes. More often, interesting possibilities arise when older technology is combined with new knowledge and new materials, or when past concepts and traditional knowledge are applied to modern technology. Inspiration is also to be found in the so-called "developing" world, where resource constraints often lead to inventive, low-tech solutions.

This second volume has 257 images and contains 36 articles published between 2012 and 2018.

Contents table:

How to Build a Low-tech Website?

We Can’t Do It Ourselves

Ditch the Batteries: Off-grid Compressed Air Energy Storage

History and Future of the Compressed Air Economy

How Much Energy Do We Need?

Bedazzled by Energy Efficiency

How to Run the Economy on the Weather

How (Not) to Run a Modern Society on Solar and Wind Power Alone

Could We Run Modern Society on Human Power Alone?

Heat Storage Hypocausts: Air Heating in the Middle Ages

Why the Office Needs a Typewriter Revolution

The Curse of the Modern Office

How to Get Your Apartment Off the Grid

Slow Electricity: The Return of DC Power?

Power Water Networks

Fruit Walls: Urban Farming in the 1600s

Reinventing the Greenhouse

How to Build a Low-tech Internet

The 4G Mobile Internet that’s Already There

Why We Need a Speed Limit for the Internet

How Sustainable is Stored Sunlight?

How Sustainable is PV Solar Power?

Restoring the Old Way of Warming: Heating People, not Places

The Revenge of the Circulating Fan

If We Insulate Our Houses, Why Not Our Cooking Pots?

Well-Tended Fires Outperform Modern Cooking Stoves

Modular Cargo Cycles

High Speed Trains are Killing the European Railway Network

Power from the Tap: Water Motors

Back to Basics: Direct Hydropower

The Mechanical Transmission of Power (3): Endless Rope Drives

The Mechanical Transmission of Power (2): Jerker Line Systems

The Mechanical Transmission of Power (1): Stangenkunst

How to make everything ourselves: open modular hardware

Electric velomobiles: as fast and comfortable as automobiles, but 80 times more efficient

Cargo cyclists replace truck drivers on European city streets

The solar envelope: how to heat and cool cities without fossil fuels

This volume is also available as a paperback or hardcover book.