Sunset Valley Lowe's

The Lowe's at 6400 Brodie Lane is located in Sunset Valley, Texas which is a pocket community surrounded by Austin.  In 2010, the census noted a population of 749 people in the 1.4 square mile area, but for such a small population it has a disproportionate amount of box store retail.  I could have chosen to analyze the Sunset Valley Home Depot because I shop there a lot too, but I chose Lowe's mainly because they have these dry-stack rock walls out front which are unusual compared to other shopping centers and the front door has a plaque announcing it as a LEED-NC Gold certified building.

I'm LEED BD+C accredited and I've worked on a number of LEED projects, and the landscape credits have historically been pretty minimal compared to other areas of construction such as HVAC, energy use, plumbing, etc.  Now, USGBC is working on adapting the SITES initiative which would mean a much more rigorous landscape component to how sustinability is identified in projects.  Anyhow, I guess my point is that when I see a LEED building I don't necessarily assume that there's much landscape or site planning innovation going on.

The overall site plan for the development is pretty typical of what you find here in central Texas with a huge, grassy detention basin up front, an enormous parking lot in the middle, and then the large box itself.  A quick Google Earth measure of the detenion basin came to 800' long and 100' wide. 

The LEED plaque is from 2006, so the parking lot trees should be at least 9 years old.  They don't seem to be thriving and providing much shade as you'd hope they might do on such a big parking lot.

 A truck was parked really far from the entries just to be shaded by this single tree.

There are some other decent native and adapted plantings on site including some Turk's Cap that look good even in late summer screening a fire hydrant. There is also a large multi-head yucca by one of the rock wall entries.

There's one one large oak tree that appears to have been retained from before the building went in.  I checked historic aerials wondering if maybe there could have been more to save, but it does look like there was already development on the site and no large mots of oaks that were removed for this building.

2003 aerial

2015 aerial

The roof area of Lowe's in huge.  The rough area of the main roof is about 440' x 260' which comes to 111,400 SF of roof area.  With Austin's average rainfall  of 33" a year this means you could capture over 2 million gallons of rainwater a year.  Irrigation water reduction is  a popular LEED credit, and rainwater collection is one way to achieve this.  As such, there's a large tank at the front of the building that's collecting water.  You can see the remote control valve as well that I'm guessing works with the auto-fill when the tank's water level is low.

But, the real collection is going on behind the building where you have 4 really large tanks connected in series.  We had a short rain not long before I visited the site after a pretty dry stretch, but it appeared from the water level gauge that the tanks were almost full.  There was water dripping down from the overflow as well.  This made me wonder if they might also collect AC condensate water into the tanks too.