September 24 2007

The Solar Decathlon is almost here...

CMU Solar Decathlon_Image 01

The 2007 Solar Decathlon is coming to the National Mall in Washington, DC this October! Houses will be on display in the "solar village" from October 12th through the 20th at 10am-5pm on weekends and 11am-3pm on weekdays. The entire Decathlon is closed on October 17th for competition purposes.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Solar Decathlon, it is a Department of Energy (DOE) sponsored competition between 20 universities to design and build a house that is powered exclusively by the sun. Photovoltaic arrays and Solar Domestic Hot Water tubes galore! The competition is divided into ten separate competitions (hence decathlon) that gauge the effectiveness of different sustainable strategies. Contests include:

This is a wonderful event for the entire family. Great cutting edge designwork, innovative materials, novel building technologies, electric cars, and did I mention that these houses are all transported from their respective university building sites by truck... so they are all modular to some extent.

For more information please visit the main Solar Decathlon Web site.

Here is a link to the 2007 Carnegie Mellon SD Web site (I was a team member and designer! Go CMU)

And below is a gallery of images from the 2005 Solar Decathlon Competition. It was wet as you will see... Enjoy!

svgallery=SVGallery_SD2005

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October 15th, 2007 at 12:10 PM

Greenline » Solar Decathlon 2007 Opens!

[...] official opening day of Solar Decathlon 2007 was Friday Oct. 12th. I visited the event on Saturday along with thousands and thousands of [...]

November 21st, 2007 at 4:21 PM

Greenline » Apricus Solar - Solar Hot Water

[...] heat dissipation units, and related components. Their equipment was widely used by teams at the 2007 Solar Decathlon competition (9 houses used Apricus equipment) and they were one of the Top 10 Green Building [...]

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