Lowtech Graph is a free, independent tool for choosing how your home meets its needs. It lists 246 ways to heat, cool, ventilate, light and power a home, supply its water, deal with its waste and feed the people in it: low-tech and bioclimatic options set beside the conventional ones. It helps you discover, compare, pick and plan the ones that suit your home, then points you to the people best placed to teach you how to build them.
124 of the 246 solutions produce something another one can use. Rain off the roof fills a tank, is filtered for drinking, leaves the shower as greywater and waters the garden; kitchen scraps become the compost that feeds it; the heat going up a stove flue can warm a tank of water. Every solution page lists what it takes and what it gives, and every resource page lists what produces or uses it, so the loops a home could close are there to find. My system is where you draw them.
Building is where experience matters most, so we link to the people who have it rather than copy them: the Low-tech Lab wiki, Build It Solar, Low-tech Magazine, the US Building America Solution Center, SSWM, Outils Autonomie, Appropedia, Terre Vivante, and independent makers on video.
It does not size anything: what a technique yields depends on how well it is built, and what a household needs depends on the household. It is not a shop, a contractor directory, or legal or structural advice. It was written from Normandy, in France: for now the climate data covers France, and the regulatory notes are French examples to confirm locally.
Updated 2026-09-25. 246 solutions across 15 household functions, 88 sub-functions and 52 resource types, in English and French. The whole thing is available as a single JSON file if you want to work with the data directly.
This catalogue would not exist without the Low-tech Lab and its contributors, whose wiki is the largest single source behind it. Every solution page names its own sources and how much confidence to place in them.
The catalogue content is published under CC BY-SA 4.0: use it, adapt it, credit it, and share what you build from it on the same terms. That was a choice rather than an obligation. The descriptions here are written from scratch, but the openness of the sources this was learned from is worth passing on.
The code is open source under AGPL-3.0.
Hey there, I'm Eric, I'm french, and I'm neither a low-tech specialist nor a developer.
Several years ago, like many people in France, I discovered Jean-Marc Jancovici's work on how tightly energy, economy and climate are coupled. It changed how I saw things. What I read after that, on resource scarcity, pollution, and how earlier societies came apart, made it hard to keep treating the way we live now as either normal or permanent.
Around the same time, I came across the Low-tech Lab and the remarkable job they, and others, do documenting techniques that are simple, repairable and useful. What I wanted was a way to see all of it at once: to compare the options for a given need, understand what each one consumes and produces, and work out which ones could fit together.
I thought about building this for a long time without the means to do it. What changed is a paradox I’m still processing: I avoided AI tools for two years on environmental and ethical grounds... and then I used one to build this. I judged that a tool helping people make their homes more sober and more resilient was worth the compromise, but you can judge that for yourself.
It's free, it's open, and there's nothing to sign up for. If it helps you explore, compare and connect your own projects, it has done its job. And if you feel like telling me how it was useful, it would make my day.
Best, Eric