Back in March, I told you about an amazingly green housing project in South Carolina, the Navy Yard at Noisette. The developers and everyone in the community can be very proud of the accomplishments but some of their fellow Carolinians took the Noisette project as a challenge to elevate the design of passive solar ranch homes to a whole new level.
Meet the Furman Cliffs Cottage. An impressive collaboration between Furman University, Johnston Design Group, Innocenti & Webel, Triangle Construction and others, the Furman Cliffs Cottage has set a new standard for passive solar ranch homes in a novel way.
Technologically speaking, passive solar ranch homes use the shifts in temperature (which just about every structure with southern exposure experiences between morning, noon and night as the sun tracks high above) to provide ventilation without the use of ventilators. While allowing for these shifts, the Furman Cliffs Cottage adds another important layer to the concept of passive solar, that of the draw against the mains by phantom power.
So long as they contain any of the modern conveniences such as computers, kitchen appliances or television sets, even passive solar ranch homes suffer from phantom power draw, the use of electrical current to keep devices in standby mode. While each appliance merely may sip power in standby, taken in aggregate, a home’s phantom power draw can be quite significant. The Furman Cliffs Cottage solves this problem through whole-house power regulation by computer.
In combination with the countless other green attributes, this innovation places the Furman Cliffs Cottage in a new breed of passive solar ranch homes which not only use natural shifts in sunlight to maintain constant, suitable temperatures but have a reverence for every watt of power emerging from the photovoltaic panels.
Perhaps best of all, the Furman Cliffs Cottage is open for tours and viewings through June of 2009. You can learn more (and can claim your timeslot) on the project website:
http://www.furmancliffscottage.com
Fomenting the Triple Bottom Line
Corbett Kroehler
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