From garage roofs to the ground: Drake Landing's plumbing

Event date: 2005-04-03

Collectors on the garages

Each house had a detached double garage, and the garages were joined by covered breezeways. That gave long, continuous roof surfaces, and the collectors covered them. The 2005 plan counted roughly 800 panels, each about 2.45 by 1.18 metres. More detail is on the solar collection page.

Each house was also projected to use about 30 per cent less energy than a conventionally heated one.

Pipes and a borehole field

In summer the harvested heat was sent into the ground. In winter it travelled the other way and reached homes as hot water through insulated underground lines. Short-term tanks in the Energy Centre smoothed the flow, two of them at 120 cubic metres each, and the district loop typically ran at 40 to 50 C.

Planners also counted the emissions benefit at about five tonnes per house each year. That figure ties the pipes and tanks back to the climate case laid out in the how it works overview.

The launch

The scheme was unveiled at a press event attended by federal, provincial and municipal officials, ATCO Gas, Sterling Homes and United Communities. It was billed as the first large-scale seasonal-storage solar heating community in North America. Sterling planned to begin building the following week and open show homes in July.

The build was meant to start almost immediately after the event, which is why 2005 pages from the archive read more like a start-up notice than a finished product.

How it turned out

The Energy Centre began operating in 2007. The system later delivered 97 per cent solar heating in 2012 and 100 per cent in 2015-16, then deteriorated and was decommissioned from 2024. The route of the pipes is described under district heating.

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