Touring the Solstice, a 2005 solar-heated show home
The Solstice was the two-storey model Sterling Homes used to sell Drake Landing to the public in autumn 2005. It was built to R-2000 and Built Green Alberta Gold standards and designed to take about 90 per cent of its heat from the sun.
Event date: 2005-10-09
Warm air without a furnace
From the living room, the house looked and felt conventional. Warm air came out of registers as usual. What changed was behind the scenes. An air handler sat where a gas furnace would normally be, and its heat exchanger was fed by hot water instead of a flame, driven by an efficient ECM fan motor. How that unit works is explained on the air handler page.
Every Drake Landing house also had a heat recovery ventilator, which kept fresh air moving through a well-sealed building. Sterling put the avoided emissions at about five tonnes of greenhouse gas per home each year.
Plans and yard
Buyers could take a two-bedroom plan of 1,593 square feet or a three-bedroom plan of 1,664. Either way there were two main bedrooms with private ensuites, a computer loft upstairs that could grow into another room, and a three-way fireplace dividing the living and dining areas.
Outside, each lot came with a 22 by 22 foot double garage, and 47 of the 52 also had a carport. Yards were landscaped and fenced with five-foot vinyl. The garage roofs carried the collectors, which is covered under solar collection.
Visiting hours
The show home was at 110 Drake Landing Court. In 2005 it opened from 2 to 8 p.m. Monday to Thursday and from noon to 5 p.m. on weekends and holidays.
A marketing snapshot
The 90 per cent figure was a design target at the time. Monitoring later reported better results, but the community has since been wound down, so the Solstice is best read as a record of how the homes first reached buyers.
For a wider view of the builder's role, see the partners page.
Quick answers
What replaced the furnace in Drake Landing homes?
An air handler that moved heat from the district hot-water loop into the forced-air ducts.
How big was the Solstice?
It came as a two-bedroom plan of 1,593 square feet or a three-bedroom plan of 1,664 square feet.