Blog – Solar Decathlon 2009 Team Germany – Technische Universität Darmstadt

This morning the results of the market viability and the architecture juries where announced. We’ve reached the 5th rank and 91 ponits (of 100) within the market viability competition. This high ranking was realy not estimated by Team Germany, so special thanks to the three executing students for this comeptition: Annika, Angela and Kai.

We’re as well proud of the 3rd rank at the architecture contest, we’ve reached 94 points (of 100). The ranking was very close in the first places.

As our first dinner event was delayed on the behalf of technical problems, we were able to serve our dinner after the competition time schedule between 10:00 and 12:00 pm. Here you see Mine and Franzi preparing for the main course and having fun.

The other teams appreciated our “northern german fish dinner in international stile” a lot.

The students convention of ASHRAE was a wonderful event with the possibility to discuss about energy efficient and sustainable architecture. By the way the students got a lovely meal for dinner and there was a raffle with excellent prizes. As one of the last prices Team Germany was able to win a USGBC shirt by our trubble shooting interior design optimization student … Mrs. Hegger.

One will never stop learning …

During the weekend there are long lines in front of the houses and especially at the Cornell house and the German house. Here you see the queue for the surPLUShome beginning on the pathway of the mall, going onto the Solar path in the middle of the mall, up the ramp back to the front door, through the house over the terrace space, down the ramp into the sleeping area and bock to the solar path.

We welcomed about 1500 people to the surPLUShome per day.

The first three subjective jury tours will come along to the surPLUShome about midday. Communications, Architecture and Market Viability are the aspects to talk about.

We started the day by a test run of every single jury tour. To generate a pushing surrounding, we had all the staff and a TV-team from the German media joining the students while presentation.

After this evening, everybody from Team Germany was really down … but we have troubleshooters against bad mood. One of these – Sina – had birthday so we had a little birthday party with cake and beer joined by some other teams as well in the reception of the hotel …

The Power outage took about three hours for both teams. Team Spain organized an emergency dinner but we were not able to run the dinner this evening. It took hours to find a timegap for the dinner another night. We hopefully will have our dinner party tomorrow night between 10:00 and 12:00 pm. And there is still no solution to the loss of points in the evening competitions.

To be honest: I wouldn´t like to be an organizer of the competition regarding all the necessary following decisions. It will be really hard to figure out which contests have been affected and how our performance can be estimated compared to other teams.

In the evening, there was a power outage for Team Spain and Team Germany by the local net-grid. As both teams went of line they were totally confused about the situation. Several contests were running that time and we already prepared for the dinner party estimated in the night. Team Germany was just running across the site and all involved persons tried to figure out possible reasons for this. It was a really hurly-burly.

The organizers tried hard to reinstall the net-grid for both teams. At this point special thanks to Byron Stafford for his effort.

The timeline has ended at October 8th 10:00 am to finish all works and to have all inspections ready for all teams. It was 10:00 as the last inspection in the surPLUShome has ended with a positive reply. So it was time to get together …

The public tours started and we were all impressed about the enthusiasm of the mostly American visitors. We gave our best but we still are able to improve …