Greentech Media

UT Austin has one of the best sustainable-design graduate programs in the country and this was its third time competing. This year, the team placed second in engineering.

BP held a design competition in the design phase of the competition. The winners of the competition won solar panels for use in the decathlon. UT Austin was the winner -- so it installed forty 190-watt panels for a total of 7.6 kW, in what Matthew Brugman, an architectural engineer for the team, called "the ideal orientation."

A salient point of the team's engineering strategy was to use the panels in the most optimal setting. Brugman said it is "irresponsible to install panels in any other way [besides the optimum configuration]."

Because of their optimum installation, the panels were performing at their expected efficiency, explained Brugman.

A TekMar control system equipped with sensors and digital controls monitored the house from an exterior trailer. This year, teams were allowed to house their batteries in a separate shed-like unit. The addition of the unit made way for more interior space for several of the teams that chose to use the shed.

Brugman explained that the team's idea was to reconceptualize the mobile home. This is evident in the trailer-like design. All the interior products were products that are readily available to the public. The goal of this was to make sustainable living seem accessible to the general public. The HVAC was a standard Mitsubishi model. Any HVAC technician could service it, even having little or no experience with PV technologies.

Apricus solar-thermal tubes were very popular on the Mall this year. The energy produced by the evacuated tubes was used to heat two large water tanks that stored water for domestic use and for a radiant flooring system.

"If anything goes wrong, it is usually blamed on the engineer, so [the professors] drill life safety into us," Brugman explained about the positioning of the evacuated tubes. He noted that many of the other teams had installed the panels on the sides of their homes, which he thought was very dangerous. "A little kid could easily run into those while playing ... And that's a trip to the hospital, almost definitely the burn ward."

The house will find a new home after its vacation to D.C. It will exist on the UT Austin campus as part of a research village.