Blog – Solar Decathlon 2009 Team Germany – Technische Universität Darmstadt

We really didn’t expect to win this contest this time. It was almost close to the end.
Then Missy did a great speech in front of all the press.

What a race in the end. At first there was the announcement of the engineering contest. Darmstadt was placed 4th place so we all did not know, here were are placed compared to the first team Illinois (they became seventh). And then the announcement of the overall winner: We all were standing there waiting just to hear Team Germany once … As it took really long … the announcement began with 3rd over 2nd to first … the eagerness was unbelievable. And in the end we knew … we did it again!

After the visit at the goethe institute, we’ve been invited to have a dinner with the team of Chiaramonte and Turner. It was a rely nice evening and we enjoyed it a lot.

This evening we’ve been to the Goethe institute. We had some very good german beer (:

As Richard King said this morning we have a lot of testing going on with the houses. Now it got down to under 10 celsius.

Today the Lighting Design Contest Scores was announced. Yeh! We are on the 3rd rank with 69,75 points (of 75).
Therefore we are on the 4rd rank overall at the moment.
But there are netmetering and engineering outstanding, so it’s a hard race to the end of the competition.

This evening we enjoyed staying at sur+home. We had some drinks (non-alcoholic of course) and talked a lot about the project and what was goning on the last days.

After the announcement we had a short team meeting. The communications jury lowered Teams Germanys mood but we are still in the race. And we know, that there are competitions for us to come.

But for this time, we had to achieve a optimized public tour and we thought about how to improve it. And the most important aspect is the spirit for energy efficient and sustainable architecture. Go and get that!

This morning the results of the communications contest where announced. It went very well … for mainly all other Teams. Team California did the frist rank with 67 points (of 75). We missed first place by 15 points.

So the mood of the Team went down a little, but we still are in second place overall.

As there was no possibility to have a close look to all the jury evaluations before anouncement of the juries results, we were a little nervous obout our overall performance in the competition. But after some calculating we found out that we are on the 2nd rank overall right now and the distance to the leading team has lowered by little.