Slashdot Mirror
Hurricane-Resistant SURE HOUSE Wins the 2015 Solar Decathalon (energy.gov)
Kristine Lofgren writes: The SURE HOUSE, designed and built by the Stevens Institute of Technology, was announced today as the winner of the 2015 Solar Decathlon. The uber-efficient house exceeds Passive House standards and uses less than 10-percent of the energy that a standard house consumes. But beyond solar-powered efficiency, the house is also designed to be open and breezy when the weather is good, but when a hurricane strikes, the house can be locked tight against the onslaught. In fact, it's so tough that it can act as a solar powered community center for an area hit by a natural disaster. Congratulations to the SURE HOUSE team! The team's website has some additional pictures, as well as more explanation of their design decisions.
Can it be digitally emailed and 3D printed in our glorious post-scarcity anti-Luddite world?
It is.
I guess they designed it for the energy conscious exhibitionist.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
So how much did it cost? Or rather, how much will it cost in production?
Website doesn't say. Unless the answer is somewhere within the same ballpark as other 1000sqft coastal home construction, it's yet another proof that you can work engineering wonders when you have no budget. We already knew that.
Perhaps I'm being too harsh. I don't want to pooh-pooh design competitions, as long as they don't try to have pretenses of being a production design. It's utterly exasperating how often someone presents the "eco-friendly home of the future" and I sit here thinking "You bloody idiots. Nobody who can literally afford a mansion is going to buy that."
So, when do they break ground?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
There is a lot to like in this, but I do have some issues.
I would like to see a series of detailed plans that show, for example, the R Value of the insulation, especially with the broad window exposure, the kWh capacity of the panels, the storage capacity, and more. Also, it needs upscaling for real-world families.
For a young couple with no kids and both working outside the home, who only need a place to sleep, it appears ideal. That ain't me or my family.
Where's my office for my writing and programming? What would be the impact on the energy system of the five computers I use constantly, or the ones others in my family use?
PV Water heat sounds nice, but for how much water? How does it handle a real winter? Is there propane backup for winter use?
Where's my media room, the big screen for my movie enjoyment?
Where are the bedrooms for my kids and grandkids when they visit?
Still, there are some good ideas here. Maybe When I build the next house, I will use some of them.
The SURE house used 9100 kwh for a year compared to 130,000 kwh for the average NJ house. That is obviously quite the improvement, but my 1970s rambler, 25% larger, only used 27,000 kwh last year - in North Dakota. About 18,000 kwh of that was for space heating. My monthly energy usage beat the SURE house three months out of the year.
For a young couple with no kids and both working outside the home, who only need a place to sleep, it appears ideal. That ain't me or my family.
From the story:
We merged the inherently efficient indoor/outdoor rooms and open floor plan of the quintessential 60â(TM)s style modern beach cottage with state of the art building science, the latest renewable energy technologies, and fiber-composite materials repurposed from the boat building industry.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
So we have an eco-friendly design to be built on illustrated beachfront that will likely be eroded into nothingness within the next couple decades. All the resources placed into its construction will be utterly wasted. Not very eco-friendly.
c'mon man, this is /., and we will whip you.
Can it be secured against vandalism after the hurricane is over?
This looks like a neat idea and all, and I'm sure that the open idea could work well, strictly considering temperature. That said, one reason why people desire to go home often comes down to the sense of privacy and solitude it provides. To do this, some isolation -- especially noise isolation -- from the outside world is needed. Unless you're somewhere quite rural, you're guaranteed to get a lot of racket (people chattering, motors running, dogs barking, etc.) from the outside world, and that's probably not often something that you'll want to put up with. To get around that, windows are shut, but, for a house like this, that means the temperature goes up. That would lead to some sort of air-conditioning requirement for many people (at least the hum of an air conditioner is temporary, and monotonous), which would seemingly blow through a big chunk of the energy savings.
"Is not a sentence" is not a sentence. Well damn.
Not sure why the summary concentrated on just the winner. This is an annual competition where teams from different schools (and sometimes companies) build energy-efficient homes. Most of the entrants are on display in Irvine, California until the 18th. Free admission.
As with most things in life, there is no single "best" answer. While they do pick a winner, if you take the time to visit the exhibit and browse the different homes, you'll see a lot of really great ideas on how to save energy.
So this Florida boy can build one
I have seen this before in american houses, but never understood it. Why put the washer and dryer in a closet in a room where they can annoy everyone? Must be a cultural thing. Newer models of your appliances also insist on playing small tunes to notify you that they are done, as if the deafning silence wasn't a clue. :) A energy efficient washing machine seems to take much longer to wash so I would guess that it would be even more annoying for longer periods of time. On top of that american appliances are LOUD, VERY LOUD! makes no sense. :D
Why not put it in the bathroom or mechanical room? The bathroom is already a wet room so any leaks from the washing machine would be less of a problem.
Well, come to think of it, it must be a cultural thing, that noise is acceptable. I have also been surprised by how much noise you can get a central HVAC to create. :) If it's not the air fan, it's the compressor outside on it's own concrete slab, being audible across half of the house. :D
you should keep your personal dreams to yourself. it gets embarrassing for you when say things out loud by mistake.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
How hard is it to just build a house with reinforced concrete on a pile foundation? And why only one floor? That's just a total waste of space. Why do Americans insist on living in flimsy shed-like houses even though many of them live in natural disaster-prone areas? Don't they have building safety codes?
It looks nice, but can I have mine with a separate kitchen and living room, please?
Stevens Institute of Technology: The SURE House - 2015 Solar Decathlon Entry
I had to laugh when I visited their website, they build a hurricane resistant house on a non-hurricane resistant sandbar(in the rendering). That is one of the problems facing us, the idiotic notion that a sandbar, sometimes called a barrier island, is a good place to build permanent structures. We shouldn't waste private and public money on these areas as well as flood plains along lakes and rivers.
-Eric