Earlier this afternoon, Alex and Jenny sent off our materials for the second SD submission. It is such a relief to have everything sent! This past Saturday night a handful of team members stayed up until 5:23am to pull all the materials together and add final touches. We’ve put so much work into this and we really did give it our all. Now we’ll just have to cross our fingers that we get in!
Several members of the team signed up for shifts at the third annual Addison County Green Energy Expo. Hosted by the local high school, the event provided a great opportunity for community outreach, and it was fun to finally have hard drafts to show people. We received a lot of support and enthusiasm, as people were excited to see a group of students working on such a progressive project. We were also able to meet representatives of local companies and learn more about they interesting technologies they offer. We have a long road ahead of us in terms of making connections, raising money, and finding sponsors for our building materials and appliances. These communications and fundraising efforts will be a critical aspect of our project – just as important as the architectural design of our house.
Today marks the first day of the spring semester SD course. The SD site recently posted Amendment No.2 to the RFP, detailing the additional proposal criteria. The deadline for second round submissions is March 16th, so we only have 5 weeks to prepare several important materials: a triptych poster, scale model, a 500 word statement “summarizing the main features of our conceptual design.” Given our time constraint, we will have to make difficult design decisions very quickly.
Luckily, we have a very strong group of students. Many of the students who were not able to be in the J-Term courses (but who had been involved in the project from the beginning) are now in the spring course, along with several excellent additions. Also, our teachers – architect Steve Smith and engineer Wayne Nelson – are awesome.
We just received an email announcing that our proposal has been deemed “within the competitive range,” but that there is going to be a second round of evaluation. This is really good news – as not all teams made it past the first round – but it also means that we have lots more work to do, and soon!
We still haven’t heard anything yet. The two SD classes began today — “schematic design” taught by Ashar Nelson and “engineering for a solar-powered house” taught by Allan Baer. The work begins!
All day, we have been eagerly and repeatedly refreshing the Solar Decathlon website. This is the day the DOE was supposed to give us word. Nothing. We've been told to expect this; we’ll wait.
