Design > It's Not That Kind of Decathlon: MIT's Seventh Solar Home

In 1939, MIT built America’s first solar-heated home. Almost seventy years, and six solar homes later, they’re honoring the tradition by participating for the first time in the 2007 Solar Decathlon, an international collegiate competition culminating in an exhibition of all the homes on the Washington Mall. “Solar7” was one of only twenty homes submitted that were accepted into the Decathlon, and will compete against the others—including the undefeated champion, the University of Colorado—in ten different categories. Awards are handed out in each category, and First, Second, and Third Places go to those teams who score the highest overall.

What is a solar decathlon, anyway?

The Solar Decathlon is a project of the United States Department of Energy (DOE). Although it predates the Bush administration’s Solar America Initiative (SAI), the Decathlon dovetails with it nicely in terms of raising awareness of the importance, imminence, and attainability of solar energy. What is the Decathlon exactly, though? It’s “a competition in which 20 teams of college and university students compete to design, build, and operate the most attractive, effective, and energy-efficient solar-powered house.” 2002 and 2005, the other years in which the contest was held, were swept by Colorado University: in 2002, they did it with a house designed to be mainstream in appearance, flouting conventions of solar construction in the process; and in 2005, they did it with a modular home whose building materials were all bio-based.

So does MIT’s team stand a chance?

Well, they’re starting with an interesting goal: to make a sustainable home that can operate in an urban area, and be affordable for the average homeowner. To this end, they’ve been using some consumer-friendly products like easy-to-install Warmboard, an integrated radiant heat system whose plywood and aluminum structure eliminates the need for a separate subfloor.

In addition to MIT, four other teams—Austin, Cincinnati, Maryland, and LTU—are using donated Warmboard in their Decathlon homes. Its ease of install seems to be its biggest plus. Understandably: while the teams all have advisors and construction managers, the students doing the bulk of the assembly have (for the most part, one imagines) never built a house before.

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