It takes creativity to design a decathlon home, strength to build it, ingenuity to power
it, and perseverance to get it here. Leaders make that happen. Thank you for building us
a brighter future. Go decathletes out there. Let's hear y’all. Let's get this competition on!
[sound of applause, cheering]
[sound of jazz music]
Torrential’s a good word.
The worst weather in Madrid for 50 years apparently. So torrential rain, flooding.
We’re really trying to push over the next 12 hours, to try and get as much done as we can.
Exhausted. Lack of sleep. Tired, aching, but I think we've just heard that we’re there.
And the students are now, now open to the public. So, so that’s good news.
We’re not just competing on the, on the efficiency front, we’re also trying to make
sustainable living popular. It’s actually a house. It's something that could, and possibly
will, become something that someone will live in.
I think we've ended up with a really nice, compact starter home, highly efficient and
really good in terms of low fuel bills, great levels of comfort, fantastic spaces with great
daylight, and there’s integrated renewables as well. So on the roof we’re generating
pretty much all of our electrical requirement for the entire year here in the UK. So much
so that we’re now using it to charge our fleet of electric cars that we’ve got on
test on another project. It's, it's a combination of all those things that have come to leave
us with this legacy from the international solar decathlon competition.
You can’t talk about this project without talking about how it was built by the students.
We knew we had an amazing opportunity of becoming our own contractor and finding out all of
the problems that that entails. So we had to become experts in, you know, where do we
store materials, when do we bring them in, what's the sequencing for health and safety.
And we’re doing all of this with students who really have never been on a building site.
So that was another problem that we had to think about with the, the design itself.
From leaving university, I went straight to a university in Chile, through a connection
that I made through the house. And then I'm coming back. I started working at a firm based
on a meeting that I had when I toured the director of the firm around the house in EcoBuild.
So I've always been interested in sustainability, but I think the house kind of allowed me to
pull a lot of threads together, and it allowed me to meet a lot of people that have actually
really helped my career.
I think it's a lovely little house. The envelope is particularly spectacular. It works well.
It's also… the appearance is great, and that's one of the things that’s often missing
with buildings that perform well. They've got to perform visually as well. And internally
the building's very tight. It’s a small building, it’s tight on the site, but it
uses the space really, really well. So none of the spaces feel claustrophobic. It's good
for modern living, the right relationship between the different rooms. And the light
well coming down the centre is just a tour de force in terms of
spreading space and making it feel rich and opulent for a very small building. It's great.
We think it is practical. We've tried to make it affordable. The brief in building it was
that it had to be solely powered by solar energy, whether that's the washing machine...
And here you'll also see that it’s powering the car as well, giving it energy. But also
we wanted to use existing materials and solutions that we already had in the business. So it’s
not blue sky thinking or radical R&D. It’s using existing products to reach the highest
possible standards that a building can.
The house should generate all of its own energy requirements here on site for the whole of
the year. It’s highly insulated. There's no radiators in here. We don’t have central
heating. We’ll have occasional top-up heating on those really cold winter days. So when
you've got a really energy-efficient home, the amount of energy you need to provide is
far less. And we’re doing that via solar technologies on the roof of the house. The
house itself has a huge array of different sensors, so for example this is a temperature
and humidity sensor. It’s a battery-feed device. It’s running off a photovoltaic
panel that's integrated into it. So we don’t have to worry about it, it running out of
batteries. But all of the information that comes from here on environmental conditions,
power consumption, power and energy generation, all of that information goes back to our monitoring
hub, and that gives us a database that we can use to analyse the performance of the
homes and the systems. It also gives real-time information to our student body when they’re
learning about the technologies. There's nothing better than actually seeing at first-hand
how something performs in the building that you’re in. So it's a really good way of
teaching and educating people about the different types of technologies we’re talking about.