Solar Decathlon [RE-wrenches]
Jeff Yago
jryago at earthlink.net
Tue Sep 24 04:37:30 PDT 2002
FYI
In case you have been under a rock for two years, in 2000, DOE had a
pre-contest invitation sent to all universities asking for their
design entries for a total solar home design. From this initial
selection 2 years ago, 14 universities were given "seed" money to
start design and construction. The schools had to raise the balance
of the money and most have spent over $500,000 per house in material
and or in kind services.
After two years in design and construction, the contest ends next week
in Washington D.C. where all of the homes have been moved onto the
Mall right in front of the Capital to create a "solar village". It
will be open to the public starting this Saturday, and stay open until
first week in October.
Here are the teams:
Auburn University
Carnegie Mellon
Crowder College
Texas A & M
Tuskegee Univ.
Univ. of Colorado
Univ. of Maryland
Univ. of Missouri
Univ. of Missouri
Univ. of North Carolina
Univ. of Puerto Rico (sent by barge!!)
Univ. of Texas
Univ. of Virginia (my team !)
Virginia Tech.
I am sure many of you have already helped a team in your area and I
have talked with some on this list during set up last week. If you
have not been involved, please see if you can schedule a visit next
week as there are some very innovative designs and many manufacturers
have donated their latest products. Ford donated an electric car to
each team which must be driven each day and re-charged by the solar.
Most homes are in the 700 - 900 sq.ft. size, and must actually work
which will be monitored by an instrumentation pack installed by DOE.
The homes must have and use each day water, cook meals, charge their
electric car, and operate a home office with their web site computer
every day, all on solar power alone - no backup connection or
generator allowed.
The homes were also required to include some form of recycled
materials as part of the materials. Our UVA design includes a cooling
and heating system that needs no central fan, and a "death star" on
the roof which is a 24" dia. polished mirror "dish" that tracks the
sun and concentrates it onto the end of a large fiber optic cable that
goes down and into several ceiling fixtures!
Although most homes use the Trace SW inverter(s), the balance of
systems are very creative and include computer controls to limit
loads, very low energy lighting and appliances, great passive design,
and some good automatic shading devices on windows.
You can get a link to each team's web page and see schedule of events
at this web site -
www.solardecathlon.org
I hope you can check out the "solar village" next week.
Jeff Yago
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