043. The 2009 Solar Decathlon winner is Team Germany

A little diversion away from our house building story. I had the pleasure of visiting the first Solar Decathlon competition in Washington DC back in 2002 and now I try to follow it "virtually". The winner of the 2009 competition is Team Germany from the Technische Universität Darmstadt with their surPLUShome. Incidentally, Darmstadt is the home of the Passivhaus Institut I've mentioned on this blog before.

Here is a description of the event from Wikipedia:

The international and biennial event is sponsored by the United States Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Competing colleges and universities build solar powered homes and operate them on the National Mall for 3 weeks every other year.

The point of the competition is not to create new building technologies. On the contrary, entrants have to use commercially available products to demonstrate that a sun-powered home can be commercially reproduced.

Link → US Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon Homepage
Link → Team Germany Homepage

030. US Passive House Institute

I just stumbled upon a sort of companion site in the US to the German Passivehaus Institut. Complete with a discussion forum. It never came up on my Google searches for some reason. Lots of good ideas about construction, even if you're not planning a passive house.

The site is here: Passive House Institute US
The discussion forum is here: PHI-US bulletin board

026. Reworking one version of the American Dream

Figure 19. Michelle Kaufmann's mkSolaire house with a 'nutrition' label (see text).

Here's another little aside while I put together another post. To a small extent, I've been following the housing industry in the US over the past couple of years and one of the few names that come up in discussions of environmentally-aware construction is that of Michelle Kaufmann[1]. She's an architect based in Northern California and she aggressively pursued a plan to design and build high-quality, energy-efficient homes in a kind of modular framework. In the last five years her company realized some 40 single family homes in this style. Sadly, the economic downturn has forced some of her supplies to close and has made this aspect of her work unsustainable. In her own words, as published on her blog[2]:

“However, we have always known that to pull off our mission, it requires scale. We always believed it would be our company to do the scaling. We were well on our way to do so. However, in this current economic climate, scaling for a small company has proven to be difficult.”

A visit to her site makes clear her commitment and thoughtfulness to improving building quality. While there are not a lot of hard numbers on her site, last year she published a white paper[3] presenting the idea of what she called 'nutrition' labels for houses (similar to the European Union energy label[4]). Figure 19 above shows an example of this. With her dedication and her interest in this area, I'm certain she'll be forging ahead with her new projects.

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[1] Her website is here → Michelle Kaufmann Designs

[2] The blog post is here → The end of one dream and the beginning of another

[3] The PDF can be downloaded here → Nutrition Labels for Homes

[4] Wikipedia entry → European Union energy label