Seaside Retreat, Jekyll Island
The problem with conventional HVAC on a barrier island.
Salt air is hard on outdoor equipment. Condensing units on an oceanfront site corrode years ahead of schedule, and on a site where the developer was preserving live oaks and building to a conservation standard, twenty-five outdoor condensers was the wrong answer twice over — visually and mechanically.
Geothermal removed the outdoor unit from the equation entirely. Every home's heat exchange happens underground, where the temperature holds steady year-round and nothing is exposed to the salt.
On most residential developments geothermal is offered lot by lot, which means it gets value-engineered out of half of them.
At Seaside Retreat the ground loops went in as part of the community's infrastructure, alongside the solar, before individual homes were sold. Every home gets it because the decision was made once, at the development level, rather than twenty-five times at the closing table.
That's the model worth copying. It is also why the project is the first residential development in the Southeast to do it this way.
What we did.
Southeast Geo Solutions served as geothermal consultant and design-build contractor for LNW Hospitality: system design, loop-field design and installation, equipment, and commissioning. On a project of this size the loop field is the part that has to be right the first time — once homes are built over it, nothing is getting revisited.
Ground loops are ground loops. The design work, the thermal conductivity testing, the bore field layout and the commissioning are the same discipline whether the building above is twenty-five houses, a high school, or a naval air station — and we've done all three.
Multi-home and multi-building geothermal is decided early.
At the infrastructure stage, before the site plan is locked. If that's where your project is, that's when to call.