Our Building

Building Tour

Here’s a short photo tour of some of our meeting locations, and you can also find a floor plan here. 

If you need assistance finding the Meeting House or attending events, please get in touch.

Special thanks to Jennifer Morris Photography for the photos!

Accessibility

The FMW campus is fully wheelchair accessible, with ramps and an elevator providing access to all buildings and spaces. Accessibility was prioritized in the renovation of our buildings

Sustainability

Solar Panels

In January 2018, Friends Meeting of Washington installed a new 25.2-kilowatt solar panel array on the westward-facing roof of the Meeting Room.

The array, consisting of 84 300-Watt solar panels and two 3-phase inverters, is expected to produce about 27 Megawatt-hours of electric power per year—which will offset a portion of our overall electricity usage.

We expect to repay the $70,042 cost of installing the panels in about seven years. FMW expects to save about $3,000 per year in reduced electricity bills—at times when the panels produce more electricity than we need, we’ll sell the power back to Pepco, our electricity provider. In addition, under DC rules, we will receive Solar Renewable Energy Credits (SRECs) for each Megawatt-hour of power that we generate. We expect to receive about $8,000 per year from sale of those credits, which will more than offset the cost of our electricity bills.  The array should produce about $20 a day in savings and credits in winter and $30 to $40 a day in June and July.

The inverters are connected to the Internet and report their energy production to the General Attribute Tracking System, which will generate Solar Renewable Energy Credits, which a broker will then sell for us.

For more detail, click here.

Panel Start up

On February 5th, 2018, FMW Property Manager Ken Orvis flipped two switches and powered up the inverters.

Ken flips the switch to power up the first of our two inverters.

You’ll see the display showing that:

  • The inverter is connected to the Pepco system which is supplying 124.2 Volts AC

  • The panels on the roof are sending down 11.7 volts DC

  • Zero watts AC power is being produced

  • 23 power optimizers, supporting 46 solar panels are communicating with this inverter.

  • Status is OFF

When our Property Manager bravely flips the switch and the status changes to ON,  the inverter starts notifying the optimizers on the roof to get busy, the DC voltage climbs to about 476 volts, and then the inverter backs down into a 5-minute wake-up sequence.

The wake-up countdown is complete.

The display is showing 541.2 volts of DC current coming down from the roof.

You’ll hear a relay click and the power output quickly climbs from zero to more than 3,000 Watts.

Then, the second inverter clicks on and also starts to generate more than 3 kW.

A little later, the two inverters together were generating more than 12,000 watts and providing a considerable part of the Meeting’s power.  The Meeting House uses less than that (on average) in February, so we were probably off the grid for an hour or so and selling a bit of power to Pepco.

Another display shows that the first inverter had already generated 95 watt-hours so far that day and more than 600 watt-hours since it was installed (it produced some power during testing).

Bees

Friends Meeting of Washington’s green roof hosts twelve beehives! The bees zoom out from up there and travel up to five miles to find the pollen and nectar available at the moment, depending on which trees, bushes and flowers are in bloom. In 2024, our hives produced 150 pounds of honey, and we entered the DC State Fair agricultural competition for the first time, winning second prize!

We sell our honey at the rise of Meeting in the assembly room, and are always looking for opportunities to share more widely, at farmers markets and the like. Our beekeepers have involved First Day School and others in the Meeting to help at honey extraction time.

Our FMW beekeepers generally work the hives on Sunday mornings from 8:00 - 10:00am. We are led by Mary Melchior and Michael Beer, and coordinated through the FMW bee collective listserv: fmw-bee-collective@googlegroups.com. Please sign up if you’d like to join us, whether to work the hives, help extract, or market our prize-winning Quaker Honey.