If you ever wanted to see a solar village? You have to see this one. The Solar Decathlon is a competition to design and build a completely solar powered home. The Department of Energy along with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is the sponsor of this event. The event, held on the national mall in Washington DC comprises of 20 homes, designed and built by students from competing universities from around the world. They build their homes and then transport them to Washington and rebuild them on the national mall between the Washington Monument and the Capitol building. Pretty cool huh! Once completed the homes are open for public tours, where you get to walk through the homes and talk to the people that designed and built them.
The homes for the competition are small in proportion to a normal house (800 sq/ft). This is more about the size restraints on moving and rebuilding the homes in DC. It also levels the playing field, the teams have strict guidelines that they need to follow, as the project has it's own specific building codes. To find out more about the event check out the web site.
http://www.solardecathlon.org/
This will be my second time working on a Solar decathlon home and my third time attending the event. In 2007 I was the construction manager/supervisor for the MIT entry into the competition. To say the least it was one of my most challenging projects to date. We had just four months to completely build the home and transport it to DC for the event, It was the most difficult four months of my life. Not that an 800 sq/ft home would be difficult to build in that time frame, but the labor force for the project was all volunteer comprised primarily of students and a community of environmentally conscious people who loved the idea. For me it was the chance to fulfill a goal, I has set for myself nearly 30 years earlier while dreaming of the future. It was an amazing project and help me gain the knowledge, I needed to continue building homes of this kind. While I would never take on the role I had for the 2007 decathlon project, It is hard not to be involved. The team of students that took on this years project comprises of students from the Boston Architectural Collage in conjunction with Tufts University, or commonly known as Team Boston. The student leaders for this project were also involved with the MIT project in 2007 and that is were I got to know them. Early on they asked me to be an advisor for the 2009 project and I gladly excepted the chance to be involved again but in a much more limited role.
Over the last year I have met with the team on different occasions to discuss the project as it progressed. In the last few months I have traveled up to the job site on different occasions to check on progress and sometimes lend a hand. As they push to finish the project in the next week of so, and then start dis assembly in preparation for the move to DC, I hope to help them along. Once in DC they have just 7 days to fully reassemble the house for the competition. I will be traveling down with them for the last 3 days of the build and the opening ceremony. This time I will take the time to check out the other homes, in 2007 I was so spent by the end of construction, I think I slept for a week.
While some of the designs are far fetched the principles are the same, build a home completely powered by solar energy. Make it attractive, efficient, livable, comfortable and affordable and display it to the public. While many of these homes are not really affordable in the broad sense, 2007's win was Germany and their home cost $1,400,000. for an 800 sq/ft home. That didn't even include transporting it to the US from Germany. Team Boston's goal is to make it an affordable one as well as livable, while still generating all the energy needs from solar energy.
http://www.livecurio.us/
While not exactly what I would consider affordable the cost for this project was around $300,000, slightly more expensive than the MIT project in 2007. I never did get the final costs for the house, but by my record keeping the cost were around $265,000. not including the prototype warm lite wall, some things you just couldn't put a price on.
If you have the desire to learn as much as you can about new techniques, systems, designs and efficiency then this is the event to attend. Tour the homes, talk to the students that designed and built these homes and find out what homes of the future will look like. I will post a slide show of the house as it stands and the competition as it progresses, stay tuned.
Tom Pittsley
ecobuilder@aol.com
http://www.eebt.org/
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment