How can you keep your home warm in winter and cool in summer using little or no electricity? How can you equip a vehicle to run on biodiesel fuel — or leftover vegetable oil?

These are just some of the how-tos that attendees might find out about at the second-annual Coos County Green and Solar Tour on Saturday.

The thing about the tour that makes it work so well for people hoping to make their lives more green — and save on energy and gas bills — is they are able to see homes and vehicles that have already been converted and talk to the owners about all the ins and outs.

“All of a sudden, solar energy is on the front page,” said Shannon Souza, engineer and consultant for Sol Coast Consulting & Design, which organized the tour.

Oregon’s tax credits for renewable energy are some of the highest in the nation, she said. On Saturday, tour takers will be able to see up close what some of their  neighbors are doing to capture those credits.

The Coos Bay home of Jamie Fereday is the only repeat this year. It is one of five houses on the tour schedule that begins at 9 a.m.

Fereday’s main house, that derives its electricity from solar panels, saves him an average of about three-fifths off their energy bill each year, he has said in past interviews.

Each homeowner will discuss what tax incentives they qualified for through the federal government and the Energy Trust of Oregon. Last year, the state paid for all but $8,400 of Fereday’s $20,000 in-home improvements to his main house, plus he received a $1,500 income tax break. Fereday’s guest home is part of the tour, too, for its living roof — with a garden growing on top — complete with vegetables.

Rick and Joan Fox of Coos Bay will showcase their 40-foot 1973 General Motors bus that has been altered to burn waste cooking oil in addition to diesel fuel. The former Greyhound-type machine has been painted light blue. Joan Fox painted a picture of a greyhound dog on the back, and calls the bus, that’s been converted into a motorhome, “Stray Hound.”

“It’s  been from Alaska to Florida to Michigan to Mexico, Arizona and places in between,” Rick Fox said.

He said the bus was changed into a motorhome in 1990 and three years ago he converted the engine to burn cooking oil by installing components from a $2,000 kit. The new parts allow a radiator attached to the engine to heat the oil before the engine starts. The motorhome already had some solar panels and they added more.

“It runs on either diesel or waste vegetable oil — french fry oil,” Fox said. “We did this when diesel was approaching $3 a gallon. We thought that was outrageous. We get six miles per gallon.”

At the time it was costing them 50 cents a mile to use diesel fuel. Now it costs 80 cents a mile, he said.

The Fox’s motorhome, that has two tanks — one that carries diesel fuel and the one for cooking oil — was featured in the June issue of Popular Mechanics magazine.

A 24-foot biodiesel-driven motorhome also will be on display. A former Coos Bay resident, 1959 Marshfield High School graduate Dick Kent and his wife Glenda, chose to live in this “home” they call Solterra.

“Our motorhome Solterra is a Winnebago View built on the Mercedes Sprinter Chassis with a five-cylinder turbo-diesel that gets 20 mpg and we run on bio-diesel where available,” Dick Kent said in a biography.

In addition, a solar PV system with a DC to AC inverter provides their electrical needs and a water filtration unit makes just about any water — even from Southern California — drinkable, he said.

The Coos County Green and Solar Tour is part of the American Solar Energy Society’s National Solar Tour and Solar Oregon’s Oregon Green and Solar Tours, sponsored by the Oregon Department of Energy, as well as ShoreBank Pacific, Windermere Realtors and Solar World.