The retired Drake Landing animation

What the old page offered

Visitors could download the animation as a Windows Media file of roughly 19.5 MB or a QuickTime file of roughly 27.3 MB. Each needed a matching player, which was normal in the mid-2000s and is a large part of why the files are hard to open now. Only the file names and sizes survived in the archive, so this page cannot say how long the animation ran or what narration it had.

The path the animation illustrated

A film about this project would naturally follow one drop of heat. It starts in a flat-plate collector on a garage roof, where fluid warms in the sun. Pipes carry it to the Energy Centre, where a heat exchanger passes the warmth on to water. In summer that water runs out through the borehole field, warming the ground. In winter the flow reverses and the heat comes back, travels through the district heating loop and reaches the air handler in each home.

Read it instead

The how it works page walks through the same sequence in plain language, with the temperatures involved: a district loop typically at 40 to 50 degrees Celsius and a storage core approaching 80 degrees by late summer. The solar collection page covers the roof end of the story in more detail.

A note on the results

The animation was a design illustration, not data. What the system achieved is on performance results: 97 percent of space heating from the sun in 2012 and 100 percent in the 2015-16 heating season.

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