9 Wilburn

Sadly, this house had been destroyed by fire and was being left to the elements, but it offered a great opportunity to apply our carbon conscious philosophy by salvaging and repurposing what remained. Redesigned and raised from the ashes this Phoenix house received WNC green built GOLD classification, along with a HERS score of 36 which satisfied our Duke Energy HERO program 5-star rating. Along with our core green building techniques that we apply to all our projects (advanced framed thick walls, highly insulated, sealed envelope, with no penetrations) we designed an “environmental safe room” for the master suite. The house normally draws power from the grid and a 2.3KW solar array. If the grid goes down the house can draw power from the battery backup system to run the lights and outlets in the master suite and to maintain gas heat and hot water; key kitchen lights and appliances also continue to function. This design provides security in any sort of gird power outage, the family can retreat to the environmental safe room and comfortably ride out the grid failure.