WESTERN SKIES - November 22, 2005

*** ENERGY EFFICIENT HOME THAT'S TASTY TOO ***

ERIC WHITNEY: For the second year in a row, the team from the University of Colorado at Boulder won the national "Solar Decathlon" competition in Washington, DC. Teams from as far away as Europe try to design and build the best house powered entirely by solar energy. Fresh from their October victory, the team have brought the house that won this year's contest back to Colorado. Maeve Conran visited them as they got ready to open the doors to the public.

MAEVE CONRAN: The eight-hundred square foot mobile home is striking in its design, both outside and in, with stainless steel metal siding over bright red exterior walls. A ramp snakes around the side of the building to the front door, making this home fully wheelchair accessible. Inside an open design gives the house a feeling of spaciousness that defies its size. The living room leads onto the one bedroom with its en suite bathroom complete with composting toilet and natural river rock flooring. Prior to last week's open house, the decathletes put the finishing touches to the home.

[sound of people working, joking]

CONRAN: All joking aside, this house is organic eco building to the extreme. With no petroleum based products used in construction, but rather natural bio-based materials such as a linseed oil flooring and a soy-based insulation material. As Julee Herdt, professor of architecture and faculty advisor to the team explains, this is a house you can quite literally sink your teeth into.

JULEE HERDT: We had building products made from corn and wheat, and soy and bamboo, and coconut, chocolate and citrus. So we used that as our branding theme to show there are ways to build buildings without heavy use of petroleum.

CONRAN: In fact, so loathe were the team to use petroleum, they decided to transport the house from Colorado to DC using only biodiesel. No easy task for the Melissa Mora, the self-titled fuel girl of the team whose job was to coordinate the route across country.

MELISSSA MORA: This is a massive package that you're transporting, so even if there are a bunch of pumps where you can get biodiesel, there is no insurance that that specific pathway is one the house can follow because what if the bridge is not wide enough, then you can't go through that route.

CONRAN: Nearly two-hundred visitors made their way through the home during its first open house in Colorado, and they weren't disappointed.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: What do I think of it? I'm ready to move in! This is beautiful, this is amazing.

CONRAN: The house cost about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in materials alone, with the solar systems costing in the tens of thousands. The system operates using two types of solar energy. One collects thermal energy from the sun to heat the house and all the water. The other uses photovoltaic, or PV cells to turn sunlight into electricity.

The hefty expense of the solar system is probably beyond the reach of most homeowners, but Frank Berkholder, one of the lead engineers on the team, says there will be eventual economic paybacks.

FRANK BERKHOLDER: The PV system payback tends to be right around twenty or thirty years depending on what you're looking at. I mean coal is cheap unfortunately, that's just the nature of the game. Solar thermal systems tend to pay themselves off in closer to four or five years.

CONRAN: The solar house will move to Prospect New Town, a development in Longmont described as a new urbanist community that mixes different architectural styles with businesses along tree-lined avenues. It is quite different from the usual tract developments seen in suburban America. So does this type of house design have a place in mainstream housing developments? Once again Julee Herdt.

HERDT: I think it is the way of the future and I think architecture is becoming more political. We're seeing building codes being changed so that we have stronger environmental methods now for our buildings that are going to be enacted into building codes and building law. So I think these are ways of building that we're going to see throughout the suburbs.

CONRAN: The solar house will be on display at CU until April 2006 when it will be moved to Prospect New Town. And it's there where it will see its next set of testers: Its first residents.

For Western Skies, I'm Maeve Conran in Boulder.