HOUSE of the MONTH |
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JANUARY-MARCH 2006 |
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| If you know of a house/building/structure that demonstrates the challenges of building in Alaska and would like to share it with us, please send a picture and a short description of the structure and its features to Rich Seifert. | |
Solar Decathalon 2005 The featured homes for this quarter are from the National Solar Decathlon competition. This competition is held every two years among college and university teams who are attempting to build a very competitive and energy efficient, renewable energy powered house. The homes are built on the Mall in Washington DC and entrants compete against each other for the best design. The points that enable winners to be named are set according to a vast scheme of accomplishment of various goals that the houses must accommodate. These are all tallied to make a final winner. Although the houses that are on our website this quarter are not the winning houses, they are two that I thought had most applicability to the Alaska situation. The front-page house is a design with a clerestory feature that allows the house to be lit in the rear from above by solar, and has a lot of photovoltaics on it. It is a small house of a design that would be amendable to Alaska. It is from the New York Institute of Technology team and its design was one I favored, and includes a small-attached garden building, with a deck for growing plants. Made to fit on a small site and focus on small is beautiful, this was a very good design and finished in about the middle of the pack from an energy and evaluation point of view. |
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The other house, shown above, is the house from the Cornell University team. This one is also very elegant and interesting and has aspects, which would make it amenable to Alaska applications. But it has even wider applicability and has already met with commercial success. A group of interested investors from the Audubon International nonprofit have decided to franchise that house and make it available as a commercial package using the Cornell University third place finishing design. They will market it as a pre-fabricated house of near zero-net-energy design for American uses. This is a wonderful step forward toward the goal of zero net energy efficient buildings, buildings that are designed to provide most of their energy onsite from sources such as solar, photovoltaics, and solar hot water. For more of the 2005 Solar Decathlon homes see the website:
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