Rice team offers tours of DC-bound Solar Decathlon house
Rice students designed house for community, climate, competition

BY JESSICA STARK
Rice News staff

Houstonians will have the chance to tour the ZEROW HOUSE  before it makes its cross-country journey to Washington, D.C., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon. From 5 to 9 p.m. Friday, Sept. 11, the team of Rice students that built the house will celebrate and give tours of the 800-square-foot energy-efficient, solar-powered home, currently located near the corner of Loop Road and Alumni Drive on the Rice University campus. The event is free and open to the public.
 

	JEFF FITLOW
	The 800-square-foot energy-efficient, solar-powered ZEROW HOUSE was created with a building and material budget of about $140,000.

While the house is an entry in the Solar Decathlon, a design and building competition to be held Oct. 9-18, ZEROW HOUSE was created by Rice’s Solar Decathlon team for Project Row Houses, a neighborhood-based art and cultural organization that seeks to develop housing for low- to moderate-income residents of Houston’s Third Ward.
 
“We are so excited that ZEROW HOUSE will have a place to go after the competition and help benefit a Houston family,” said Roque Sanchez, a Rice graduate student who entered ZEROW HOUSE in the competition while he was an undergraduate at the university. “Our house shows technologies that really are within reach for the average American.”
 
Like other Solar Decathlon houses, ZEROW HOUSE will be able to produce all the energy needed for its operation on-site using photovoltaic solar panels and other green technologies. But unlike other competition entries, it was designed with affordability and a specific site in mind.

While other teams operate on half-a-million-dollar budgets, ZEROW HOUSE was created with a building and material budget of about $140,000 so that its design and concepts could be replicated in six energy-efficient, one- and two-bedroom homes on two 50-by-80-foot lots in Houston’s Third Ward. After the Solar Decathlon, ZEROW HOUSE will be transported back to its permanent location in Houston — at the corner of Francis Street and Bastrop Street. There, two local residents to be selected by Project Row Houses will call it home.
 
Engineering a house for Houston had its own challenges. The team specially tailored the house to withstand the rigors of Houston’s Gulf Coast climate by including a limited number of windows to reduce heat gain from the sun in the summer. In that same vein, they thickened some of the walls to reduce the amount of heat that will seep into the house during the hot months. Rice’s Solar Decathlon team also used a foundation and materials that could stand up to hurricane-force winds.
 
“ZEROW HOUSE is not a ‘pie in the sky’ idea,” Sanchez said. “These are viable technologies that people can use in their own homes.”
 
The team also had to design a roadworthy house that could weather a 1,500-mile journey and meet highway regulations. Because team members will only have five days to assemble the house on the National Mall, they decided it would be best to tow the house to D.C. as whole as possible. On Sept. 24, a crane will lift the house onto a truck to transport it to the National Mall.
 
Over the past two years, more than 150 Rice students have worked on ZEROW HOUSE with the support of engineering and architecture faculty members. The team of Rice students was the only one from Texas among the 20 teams chosen from around the world to participate.
 
You can follow the progress of the ZEROW HOUSE team on their Web site at http://solardecathlon.rice.edu/ or on Twitter at http://twitter.com/zerowhouse.