student news
BY JAKE STUMP
PHOTOS: SOLAR DECATHLON TEAM
If at first you don’t succeed—so the adage goes—try, try again. Which is exactly the mantra from West Virginia University’s first-ever foray into the Solar Decathlon. The Mountaineers hope to see you back in 2015! While the WVU Solar Decathlon team did not win the competition, it did bring home first place in the Integration of Nature and Technology category.
member of the 2013 WVU team. “We got the house done. We represented WVU. That was our full intent.”
More importantly, however, the team fulfilled what it set out to accomplish: building a solar-powered, energy-efficient house from the ground up.
The team got off to a sluggish start in California, where the contest was held this year, as it was penalized for plumbing issues and trucks hauling materials from West Virginia arrived out of order.
The Solar Decathlon is a design-and-build contest sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy. Team Austria, consisting of the Vienna University of Technology, claimed the top spot in the international competition. Still, WVU students learned a valuable lesson or two from the experience, and being selected to participate in the competition alone is an accolade itself. “We feel accomplished,” said Sharrafti Kuzmar, a computer science student and
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| Spring 2014
Students still managed to top the house off with some Mountaineer charm. The WVU house was the first log-style home accepted into the Decathlon. It relied on natural resources to control temperature and incorporated a smart home system that utilized sensors for various features. Plus, it was “homey” and smelled like white pine. In other words, it didn’t resemble what you would envision as a futuristic home, or something out of the Jetsons. “People walked in and said, ‘I could live here,’” Kuzmar said. “This actually looks like a house.”