Mountain View Builders, Morgan County, WV’s green builder, will unveil the Mountain View Solar House at an open house event from 11am to 4pm on July 12, 2008 in Berkeley Springs, WV. The event is free and open to the public and will be held rain or shine. Tour the Solar House and learn about all of the various renewable energy technologies (including solar PV, solar hot water, and wind power) and green building techniques employed at the Solar House. Meet the vendors, subcontractors, and Mountain View employees whose products, services, and labor played pivotal roles in building the Solar House. Food will be provided by the award-winning Lot 12 Public House. The Mountain View Solar House is located at 3026 Pious Ridge Road, Berkeley Springs, WV 25411.

The mission of Mountain View Builders, LLC is to design and build homes that incorporate renewable energy and sustainable building processes, including building envelope design, solar hot water, solar electricity, wind power, radiant heat, and geothermal technologies. With an eye on the future, they build more comfortable energy and resource efficient homes, and work with like-minded subcontractors, suppliers, and designers. They concentrate on finding and implementing new products and technologies that seamlessly integrate with our building philosophies.

In 2005, Mountain View Builders, LLC launched a new organization called Mountain View Solar. Mountain View Solar is an educational extension of Mountain View Builders with the goal of educating the public about alternative energy sources, sustainable materials and building practices and testing these new (and sometimes old) ideas and materials. The Mountain View Solar House is a test base for many technologies and products, and is a work in progress. Most of the project is designed for testing in a real world living environment as well as ease of changing equipment to test other items.

The house was purchased from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth through the US Department of Energy’s 2005 Solar Decathlon in Washington, DC. It was moved to Berkeley Springs, WV where it has been built onto an existing farmhouse. The house is super insulated and uses passive and active solar electric systems, a solar hot water system, as well as a Skystream 3.7 wind generator. The house is grid-tied and net metered, spinning the meter backwards whenever there is more energy being made than being consumed by the house. The house has been featured many times in the regional press and the West Virginia builders Magazine.

Mountain View Builders, LLC was featured on the front page of the June 28th Real Estate section of the Washington Post.

As a supplement to that article, Mountain View owners Mike and Pete McKechnie were featured in an online forum on washington
post.com and it turned out to be the second most popular discussion on the site. The transcript of the online discussion is available here.

For more information about the open house, Mountain View Builders, LLC, and Mountain View Solar, visit mountainviewbuilders.com and mountainviewsolar.org or call 304.258.4320. Print Add a Comment Back to All Articles