Porchfront Homes Green Construction [Video]

This is the first video interview I did with Mary Coonce of Porchfront Homes (more to come).

In this first question I wanted to find out if they did their own green architectural designs, but the video actually covers more of how Porchfront Homes got started in green construction. I guess you give the client what they want and you end up changing your construction market niche. Perhaps Mary and her husband Tim should change their name to GreenPorch.

SolarDave: Do you design your homes yourself or have a green architect?

Mary Coonce: No, we actually have a women architect. She actually didn’t start out designing the houses for solar. That wasn’t the original intent. Porch front homes is our theme with traditional front porches.

She designed one of the houses for one of our new home owners - we pride ourselves on here are our designs then people come in and we have a preconstruction meeting with them, and we customize - different thing for them, from the interior floor plans to additional decks.

And one couple came to us, and they said, “Hey, we want solar and geothermal on our house. Would you guys be willing to customize that way?” So we said, “sure!”

So are architect (Julie Zender from Jazz Architecture LLC) and went ahead and redesigned the roof and the roof line and we made some changes to the house. They did a lot of research themselves - solar system and geothermal system.

That was our first solar house, and that is kind of usual to do that in a subdivision, especially with the geothermal. The solar at the time was kind of new in the subdivision - geothermal was brand new.

So then we had a green event out here to show - hey we can do this in the subdivision and you don’t have to be living out in the country off the grid to use solar and geothemal. We had quite a turn out for that. We decided to do was to offer solar on the rest of our homes.

But the roof lines weren’t running all the right way, so it was making it more difficult. I think there has been some newer strides made in technology now put half our panels on the south and half on east to still make it very efficent.

That helped us with some of the homes and Julie (no last name) redesigned some of the existing elevations so the roof would accommodate the solar completely on the south side.