 On opening day, all the solar decathletes gathered for a group photo.
The WSU team is front and center in white teeshirts. Photo by Stefano
Paltera, Solar Decathlon.
October 8. At last, the competition begins. The houses are
thrown open, thousands of people enter each day, and the students
give tours. Then it starts to rain.
Is it some kind cosmic joke that a solar competition should take
place in the pouring rain? The area receives more rain in one day
than in the previous two months, reports Taylor. Seven inches fall
in one day. “It was awful,” he says. Students from a number of
schools fight persistent leaks in their houses. They were built,
after all, to be taken apart, creating a lot of potential for
leakage.
The students take each leak as a lesson in how they could have
done things better, says Taylor. Every time a new problem occurs,
they laugh and then get to work fixing it.
During the course of the competition, houses are judged in 10
different areas. Running out of energy as the very wet week wears
on, the WSU students sometimes have to disqualify themselves from
certain phases of the competition because they aren’t able to
produce enough electricity to participate. Unlike solar homes which
are connected to the power grid and retain ample power when it
rains, these houses have no back-up power supply.
 The competition underway, WSU team members showed off their
evacuated-tube collectors for the home's solar hot water system. Photo
by Stefano Paltera, Solar Decathlon.
Then it’s over, and it’s time for the WSU team to disassemble
their house and prepare it for the journey back to Pullman. To
Andrea Read, the site looks as if a bomb had gone off. Still, “even
though we finished 15th,” she says, “it made everything worth it to
have people come in and say, ‘I would really love to live
here.’”
“Just seeing the public response to something that we spent so
much time on—it was a wonderful feeling,” she says. “That was
really the whole meaning of the competition itself. It wasn’t
necessarily who was the most energy efficient or who had the
biggest battery banks. It was all about educating the public about
how comfortable and livable responsible living can be. It showed
people it can be done well.”
As of January 2006, the house is scheduled to be relocated to
Magnuson Park in Seattle, where it will be on permanent display as
a testing facility for high-efficiency building products and as an
educational center.
Click here for more information about
the Solar Decathlon and the development of WSU's decathlon
entry.
Tina Hilding is communications
coordinator in WSU's College of Engineering and Architecture.
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