"Do you want to see the gooey?" Team North's Kevin Muise asked, or so PM thought, on a recent visit to the Ontario/British Columbia team's Solar Decathlon house. He was referring to the school's Graphic User Interface (GUI), which monitors the home's electric and water usage. Turns out the GUI isn't gooey at all; it's a series of screens mounted conspicuously throughout the building to deliver breaking news of energy production and consumption.
Tallying up the watts can sometimes feel like watching the grass grow, but Muise's GUI system keeps it interesting. "You might get a message like, you're using 10 percent less energy this month," he says. His research into "psychological studies of energy consumption" revealed benefits in using positive reinforcement to encourage efficient behaviors, and also a need to "put kilowatt-hours in human language." So when electrical or water consumption is above net-zero, for instance, the whole screen shines brighter. The system also introduces social components--if the house is connected to other energy-producing buildings, like at the Decathlon, the buildings can compete to consume the least amount of energy while the GUI keeps score.
The students from University of Waterloo, Ryerson University and Simon Fraser University aren't alone in creating a slick monitoring system--Virginia Tech's is nice, and Rice's showed 1.4 kilowatts in production during PM's visit--but the way the North House generates its energy is unique to the harsh, high-latitude environment. At the top of the exterior walls, where historic houses might have a cornice, the North team clad the perimeter with building-integrated photovoltaic panels, mounted vertically to catch the low-angle sunlight common to the region. The panels operate at 20 percent efficiency due in part to the manufacturer Schuco's decision to move the electricity-transmitting wiring from the front to the back of the panels, leaving the face collectors as uninterrupted fields of silicon.
Describing the placement of the panels, project designer Chris Black says the building is "engineered as an envelope." He says the panels conceal hardware for a "dynamic shade," the key component to protecting the house's 75-percent glass window facade from extreme heat and cold. The windows allow daylight, but to seal out the elements, a wood and nylon screen descends to create an R-9 membrane Black calls "thermally inert." It's a cozy phrase. And it's easy to imagine holing up in the North House--did we mention the bed descends from the ceiling?--keeping an eye on the energy consumption while riding out a winter storm.