As if Tifft Nature Preserve Preserve wasn’t green enough, the Visitor Center has been outfitted with a number of new energy and resource efficient amenities. After paying a visit today, I was surprised to learn that the center has been outfitted with geothermal heating units, which will help to keep the energy bills down throughout the year. On top of that, the roof of the center has been tiled with solar panels, that are scheduled to be hooked up in coming days. The solar array is certainly eye-catching and is hard to miss, unlike the geothermal unit that is a bit more obscured.
Along with the solar and geothermal additions, the center has also updated its bathrooms with electric hand dryers and water efficient toilets, which will help to achieve the facility’s overall mission to minimize its footprint by going off the grid as much as it possibly can.
In other Tifft news, a new fishing pier has been built on the grounds. The pier addition was part of the DOT’s road construction project along Route 5 and Fuhrmann Boulevard. While downgrading the elevated highway into an actual boulevard would have been an incredible gift to the entire city (never happened), the fishing pier is actually quite nice when the speeding trucks and motorcycles aren’t passing by at high rates of speed.