ZEROW House storms national scene, finishes eighth overall

By Michelle Jin     10/22/09 7:00pm

Earlier this month, 25 students from Rice's Solar Decathlon team traveled to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. to participate in the Solar Decathlon competition, where they finished eighth in the world. Hosted every two years by the U.S. Department of Energy, the competition challenges 20 teams of college students from across the globe to design and build energy-efficient, solar-powered houses.

From Oct. 8-16, juries of professionals judged each team's house in 10 categories, including Architecture, Engineering, Comfort Zone, which assesses indoor conditions such as temperature and humidity, and Home Entertainment, which evaluates the house's ability to power electronics and accommodate guests.

Rice's house, named the ZEROW House - Zero Energy Row House - placed eighth out of the twenty teams in the competition. A team from Germany placed first overall. In the categories of Architecture and Market Viability, the ZEROW House came in second, after a joint team from California College of the Arts, Santa Clara University and the University of Louisiana, respectively.

---

---

The category of Market Viability was especially important to the Rice team, who sought to create an affordable solar house for Houston, the team's Architecture Lead David Dewane, said.

"We knew from the outset that . we wanted to do an affordable house and demonstrate to the public that solar energy was affordable," Dewane, an architecture graduate student, said. "We wanted to demonstrate that you could submit a house to the solar decathlon that was reasonable for the average American who wanted to go solar."

The team estimated that, with labor costs, it would cost $140,000 for the house to be constructed in Houston, a significantly smaller amount than that of many other houses in the competition.

Dewane said he felt that the team's decision to put construction of an affordable solar-powered house as its top priority resonated with others at the Solar Decathlon, especially in light of the economic downturn.

Dewane said the affordable nature of the house would spark a trend for future competitions.

"I feel confident that we changed the dynamics of the competition," Dewane said. "And in the next round in 2011, you'll see more houses that are operating on the same wavelength as the one we did - taking the affordable angle."

The ZEROW House produces all the energy it needs to operate through a photovoltaic array, a series of solar panels hooked up to the power grid that store extra power produced by the ZEROW house, and a solar hot water system.

A team of architecture and engineering students worked to complete the project and move it to the competition in Washington, D.C.

"The experience to be able to work with people from other disciplines was very rewarding," Hanszen College junior Aron Yu said.

Yu is an electrical engineering major who worked on designing the photovoltaic systems of the house.

"This project is interdisciplinary, and I worked a lot with [chemical and civil engineers]," he said. "The engineering group also had to work with the architecture group to make this work. Working with people who think very differently from you is very rewarding."

The competition included public viewing days, and nearly 40,000 people toured the ZEROW House.

"It was really cool to see all the people who toured through be really excited about the house and the Solar Decathlon," Wiess College junior Travis Martin said.

Dewane said the team's goal was to convince the general public that solar energy is accessible.

"You can't think of an event like the solar decathlon as ... going out there to get the most points and take home the trophy," Dewane said. "Very early on, we defined what winning would mean for us. We wanted to do an affordable house and demonstrate to the public that solar energy was affordable. We wanted to demonstrate that you could submit a house to the Solar Decathlon that was reasonable for the average American who wanted to go solar."

The ZEROW House is now back in Houston, and Dewane believes the Rice Building Workshop, a part of the School of Architecture designed to collaborate with organizations in the Houston community, will continue to evolve the house before it will be used in the community.

The ZEROW House was designed as a model house for Row House Community Development Corporation, an organization that builds houses for low- to moderate-income residents in Houston's third ward.

"We wanted to show that a solar house is possible for low-income families," architecture student and Brown College senior Diana Ang said.

---