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Email14th Overall
October 26, 2007
Carnegie Mellon is a three-time competitor comprised of students from many disciplines and programs throughout the university as well as the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh.
Their concept this year was based on modular housing that can be customized to suite the needs of different families. There is a central core that holds all the mechanical systems, as well as the kitchen and bathroom. Individual "pods" can be added in a variety of configurations and easily "plugged in" to the core's mechanical systems. This concept allows for a high level of flexibility and individual customization.
"The idea of plug and play is to allow scalability of the house so it can be marketed as a product to allow a family to add to the house or subtract from it [as needed]," said Ben Saks, a senior architecture student and the project manager for the team. Team Tripod envisions the individual "pods" being sold and traded on eBay as consumers' lifestyles change.
Because of the modularity of the house, it only took four hours to assemble on-site.
While CMU finished 14th overall, the team was very happy with their project. "It was more important to have a house that we were proud of than to win the competition," said Robin Fok, one of the team members.
One of the big technological innovations was the Centria structural insulated panels (SIPs). These panels are 4" thick and provided all the insulation for the house. They covered the whole shell. Because the panels do all of the insulation work, the house can be covered with any building material (CMU chose cypress siding and corrugated stainless steel) -- another aspect of its customizability. These panels are also fully recyclable at the end of their usage life.
Because of the flat-roof strategy, CMU chose SunPower 215 solar panels, which have the highest efficiency available on the market. The roof holds a 7 kW array. As part of their system they are beta-testing Xantrex's hybrid inverter chargers and battery system. Flat-roof panel installation is not the optimum configuration for solar panels. However, on cloudy days, the panels are able to catch more energy than a traditional 45° angle installation. Clouds cause the UV rays to bounce and spread over the sky, which is a domed surface. A traditional array will only be able to use the ones directly in front of it, and when it's cloudy, those numbers are minimal. With a flat configuration, the panels are able to absorb energy from a much wider area of the sky, thus allowing for higher efficiency on a gray day.
Also employed with the rooftop solar panels were solar-thermal evacuated tubes made by Apricus. These tubes are the conventional evacuated tubes used for solar-thermal heating. A 50-gallon water tank in the house stores hot water for everyday use.
At the end of the competition, the house will be disassembled and trucked back to Pennsylvania, where it will be permanently installed (with all working plumbing and water-filtration systems) at the Powder Mill Nature Reserve in Westmoreland County, Penn. The nature reserve is the biological research center of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.