SCU WINS THIRD PLACE!

After a stressful day (beginning in 6th place) and rising in the ranks and making a tenuous third place only hours before the final awards ceremony, we had only to await the announcement of 150 subjective Engineering jury points before the tabulation of final placings. A noisy procession, with SCU at its head, moved down Decathlete way from the Capitol Building to the Washington Monument around 2 pm to begin the awards ceremony. As we passed, we cheered on each other team as they gathered on their decks to pile into the growing parade. Puerto Rico’s drums and some makeshift water jugs added to the festivities. As we reached the main tent, each team was announced and entered the stage area loud cheers and flashing cameras. As thousands of participants and observers attempted to squeeze into a much to small tent for the ceremony, the heat rose to a solid 100 degrees with almost identical humidity.

After a host of speeches and rising nerves, Engineering jury points were awarded. Darmstadt, University of Texas at Austin, and University of Coloardo won fist, second, and third place respectively. As Darmstadt’s name was announced, the tent erupted in cheers - the entire team screaming, jumping and hugging one another. There was no way another team could displace them from first after a first place finish in Engineering. This left our position up in the air - depending on the other engineering scores, we could get as high as second, or be bumped from our third place spot to a position much lower than we wanted to think about.

Only minutes later, the Secretary of the Department of Energy took the podium to announce the winner. All he had to say was the first line of his speech, “this team set out to build an elegant house” - words straight from our mission statement - before the whole team erupted. He praised the teams communications and hot water performance and called up to the stage as the third place winner, the “true Cinderella story from California: Santa Clara University.” Amidst screams of joy, frantic jumping, hugging and tripping over one another, the team made its way to the third place podium. James took the microphone to thank everyone and said “The most important thing in a competition is not to win, but to succeed; and today, 20 teams have succeeded.” This comment has been quoted by the competition organizers on the official Solar Decathlon website as best summarizing what the Solar Decathlon is at its very best.

The University of Maryland took second while the Technical University of Darmstadt took an ecstatic first place. The day concluded with a few hours of photographs, group hugs caught on camera, and last minute visits between teams to one anothers houses for final goodbyes and best wishes to good competitors and now good friends. The SCU team gathered later in the evening to share laughter, happines, and barbecue cooked by the Dean of the School of Engineering, Godfrey Mungal. Hours of champagne toasts later, every possible team member, supporter, and competitor near and afar had been praised, thanked, and celebrated fully.

Over the night we moved from 11th to 9th place due to the hot water tests that Nora Hendrickson aces each day and Alberto Fonts’ consistent performance in the comfort zone category. The organizers introduced new hot water judges into the competition and brought them by our house early in the morning so Nora could show them how a good hot water test went. She is becoming known in the Instrumentation tent as “Nora: The Hot Water Queen.” The subjective Lighting category announcements were presented this morning, which bumped us from 11th to 9th place. We broke the top ten!

The Congressman Comes Calling
Other highlights of the day included a personal visit from our local California Congressman Mike Honda. He arrived, toured the house, cracked some jokes, and even saw us ace a hot water test in front of his very eyes. To the rest of the team waiting outside, all we heard was he and his staff explode with cheers and applause at the successful test. The Congressman has been incredibly supportive to us throughout the project, and even offered to set us up with a private tour of the Capitol tomorrow. Even though a lot of us have been here almost two or three weeks, we have hardly taken a look at the Capitol, so we are very excited.

Solar Dinner Party
We ended the evening by hosting our dinner party for our neighbors on the National Mall. Part of the Decathlon includes preparing a dinner (worth 15 points) in your kitchen for your three neighboring teams. Tonight was our turn to invite the Madrid, Northern California Texas A&M, and Puerto Rico teams over to our house. Our whole team welcomed them for appetizers on our back deck, which turned into a jam session with Evan’s bongo drum and the Puerto Ricans assorted percussion instruments. As other students were preparing the meal - the oven conveniently stopped working. Faced with 8 hungry decathletes and 15 points on the line, five college kids scrambled to figure out how to cook salmon on a cooktop instead of in the oven. Miraculously, despite our panic, the meal came together beautifully and the night ended with improvization games in our yard. Everyone went home happy. Special thanks to everyone who flexed their culinary muscles tonight.

Competition Week Begins!

With reduced public tour hours (only 11:00am - 3:00pm), the core engineering group was freed up today to strategize, work on quantitative tests, and catch up on some much needed rest on the shaded grass next to our Ripple Home. (Naps anyone?) Competition week began with full force today as appliance and lighting tests started and we were finally allowed to untether our electric car to begin the week long distance race powered solely off our home batteries.

Engineering Tests Underway

Today was the first day of the truly nerve-wracking competition week. Appliance tests - boiling water, running hot showers, dishwasher cycling, television usage and refrigerator/freezer consistency monitoring - began at 8:00 am. Nora Hendrickson orchestrated the monitoring and execution of these tests throughout the morning. These tests are meant to simulate the daily energy consumption of our home’s theoretical inhabitants - who apparently boil six pounds of water before ten o’clock in the morning and watch the same movie over and over for an entire day. As engineering is our strong suit, and our battery banks are relatively full, we expect to do very well in the appliance tests scattered throughout this week.

Today was also a good day for putting some miles on the electric car. We completed about 46 solar miles on a very flat (battery-efficient) three-mile park loop nearby the National Mall. The park was teeming with cyclists (very sunny here in D.C. right now!) and now with Solar Decathletes. At one point, we even made friends with a cyclist named Eric who drafted off of our 15 mph slipstream for a good twenty minutes as he took a break from his workout.

Points Posted!

The first points - those for the architecture jury tour - were posted this morning around ten o’clock. As the only university without an architecture school, we were not anticipating a very high score in this category. We currently stand in 18th place, 67.356 points below the leader - Germany’s Darmstadt.

Points for communications, marketing and engineering will be released in the next few days - all our strong suits. Check back in a few days for the latest information on team standings. You can also find scoring information updated every 15 minutes on the Solar Decathlon website.

First Full Day of the Competition!

The Solar Decathlon truly is a competition of firsts. First time in D.C. for most Santa Clara University students from the West Coast (the “left coast” from our vantage point). First time taking on such a large project successfully. First time meeting such similar students from nineteen universities around the world. First brilliant orange/pink sunset behind the Washington Monument from a quarter mile away. First time looking out the back door onto the Capital Building. We have put down our construction gear and are instead gearing up for the real the public tours, jury visits, and all-around chaos of public life on the National Mall.

Team Rises to Challenges of Jury Tours

And yes, they are challenging. About twenty minutes before the arrival of the jury, a “runner” comes to the house and asks the team to clear out the growing line of visitors waiting for a tour. This in itself is quite a feat. In that time, all the decathletes who will be presenting to the jury finish their last minute preparations. This morning, we had a runner come and announce that we would be having all three tours this morning - one right after another. Architecture was first, then marketing, then communications. Our house ended up being closed for a few hours to public tours, but a lot of the team members had a good time chatting with visitors outside our gate - particularly since so many Santa Clara University alumni were around the area after an alumni gathering the previous evening.

Reports are that all tours went very well - the jurors (all highly-respected professionals in their various fields) were friendly and inquisitive - something we thrive on. Evan Sarkisian overheard the jurors crack a few jokes as they walked up to the house. “They’re funny!” he whispered to the team. This put us to ease and the tours went smoothly. Points from these tours will be announced periodically throughout the next week.

After the tours, we jumped straight into a marathon of public tours. Thousands of people visited our home and their overwhelming response was “I could live here.” That is the best we can ask for. Overwhelming opion from our team was how incredible it was to be a college student and have our voices magnified so loudly to such a large audience. Though our truck arrived three days late, we were one of a few houses open all day for tours. Unfortunately, several of our next door neighbors were still hurrying to finish construction. We were happy that the competition organizers scheduled jury tours for unfinished homes tomorrow, buying them a little more time to finish work. This is a competition for twenty universities.