Thursday, October 27, 2011

Solar Decathlon: Learning about energy from the ground up

By Julianne Rhoads, doctoral candidate, UMass Lowell

For nearly two years, Team Massachusetts – made up of students from UMass Lowell and Massachusetts College of Art and Design – worked on the 4D Home, our entry into the 2011 U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon. We recently completed the competition, building a full-scale, solar-powered home in Washington, D.C.

Our team was one of 20 worldwide chosen for the competition, held every two years since 2002. Like many of the team members from UMass Lowell, I am studying solar engineering. Our MassArt teammates are architecture and design students. Together, we tackled work beyond the classroom, including fundraising and advocating for our project during the design phase, which lasted more than a year. In Washington, we worked in shifts 24 hours a day to assemble an entire house in just a week, complete with an HVAC system, appliances, an array of 28 solar panels and furniture.

On the last day of construction, as everything came together, we saw our completed house for the first time. For me, it was the most powerful moment of the entire experience. We’d been staring at drawings and renderings for two years and finally, it was all real. It changes how you think about your work when you are designing, building and testing a system for a real end user.

Our hands-on education included installing the array of photovoltaic and hybrid panels needed to power the house and provide hot water. Our array, one of the 4D Home’s most unique features, is integrated into an overhead trellis. The PV panels provide passive shading. Visitors could walk underneath to see all of the details of the PV cells, the under-mount hybrid panels, piping and wiring. One of the most visible examples of the collaboration between the architects and engineers on Team Massachusetts, the trellis helped our house stand out from other houses with hidden solar panels.

Limited to less than 1,000 square feet by contest rules, the 4D Home was designed to be an affordable, livable family home, which received praise in the competition. Our movable interior walls allow the 4D Home to adapt with a family over time (the fourth dimension), showing a dynamic way to live comfortably in a smaller space. For the first time, affordability was a decathlon “event,” with the goal of illustrating how the average homeowner can save money through clean energy technologies and energy efficiency.

The home also had to be net-zero for energy consumption. We focused on an energy-efficient “envelope,” taking measures like super-insulating the house rather than using oversized equipment to compensate for inefficiencies. This allowed us to use only 28 panels to be net-zero. Had we insulated the structure merely to Massachusetts code, we would have needed at least 10 more panels to achieve the same energy capabilities.

We placed ninth in the competition, the best finish ever for a team from Massachusetts. We were fourth in the affordability category, second in energy balance and fourth in market appeal. The 4D Home was appraised for approximately $280,000 and it has been sold to a couple who have relocated it to Maine.

Through the competition, I experienced engineering beyond design. We learned to troubleshoot and solve problems when reality required us to change our plans. We worked with companies and individuals in our community. This experience was invaluable, and far from most school projects where you turn in your work and write a paper. And it was a lot more work, too.

 
 

Julianne Rhoads is a 25-year-old doctoral candidate in solar energy engineering at UMass Lowell originally from Tucson, Ariz.