After three years of hard work, students who designed a homemade solar home will watch it drive away.
The home was disassembled last week and loaded onto flatbed trucks to travel to Washington D.C., where it will be one of 18 solar homes in the national Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon competition.
On Friday, the container of the house was loaded onto a 53-foot truck to be transported cross-country. Today, two more trucks are set to depart with the rest of the house material. Once the house pieces arrive in D.C., the team will reassemble the house to be judged in the competition.
The WSU solar home team is the only competitor in the Northwest, and used materials unique to the Northwest when constructing the home.
The competition, which requires teams to design a 500-800 square-foot house that is fully functional by only using solar energy, will begin Oct. 7 on the National Mall. After the competition, the house will remain permanently in Seattle’s Magnuson Park, where it will be a site for educational purposes and will be used as a solar testing facility.
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