SURE HOUSE

At the SURE HOUSE we are designing for resiliency from storms, floods and the common byproduct of the two, blackouts. As many who live along the shore know, power outages can be frequent due to harsher conditions. What most people don’t know, is that although a house may have solar panels that does not necessarily mean they’ll have power during a blackout. In fact, most solar installations are not ‘islandable’, or able to isolate from the power grid and continue to produce power.

When tied to the power grid, our solar array produces around 10,000 Watts (SUSTAINABILITY MODE). When disconnected from the grid, our transformerless inverter switches over to providing 3,000 Watts of emergency power entirely isolated from the grid (RESILIENCY MODE).

We know how tight knit shore communities can be, especially coming to the aid of neighbors in times of emergency. Here at Stevens we feel that SURE HOUSE should help out too, so we are engineering a resilient charging hub that can allow neighbors without power to charge up their electronic devices. We are allocating a portion of our resilient power to USB chargers integrated on the exterior of our home. This charging circuit is being designed as a fully marine system, so it’s resistant to the coastal salt corrosion as well as being completely waterproof. Ultimately, we want this system to survive storms and provide aid to the community afterwards.