Team Ontario has seen the future of housing and believes it includes an ECHO. In fact, the team of students from Carleton University, Algonquin College and Queen’s University is so confident in ECHO — the ultracompact, net-zero, solar-powered home they’ve designed and built over the past 18 months — that they’ll soon be trucking it all the way from an Algonquin parking lot to California for the biennial Solar Decathlon competition.

Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, the competition runs for 10 days in October. For the first time ever, Ontario institutions number among the 20 teams, winnowed down from dozens of applicants worldwide, that are vying for first place. That honour will go to the house that best blends affordability, consumer appeal and design excellence with optimal energy production and efficiency.

The competition is meant to introduce clean-energy products and technology into the mainstream while educating students and the public alike.

At just 940 square feet, the ECHO “was designed for people like us, our generation,” says Chris Baldwin, Carleton’s student project manager and, at 24, a member of the so-called Echo Boomer generation.

By that he means people eager for home ownership but on a far more modest scale than the McMansions that may have addicted their parents.

The name ECHO (it was originally called the Aurora House) also plays on “eco,” reflecting the home’s ecologically conscious design.

The modular structure was built in two parts by students in the advanced housing program at Algonquin’s Perth campus and shipped to the college’s Woodroffe site this spring. There, the two parts were joined by three mammoth, 13-foot bolts. It’s since been outfitted with a deck, painted and furnished.

That whole process will be reversed later this month so it can be loaded aboard a flatbed truck and shipped south, where the team will reassemble it for judging.

“There were a few issues along the way, but we figured them out and now it’s easy to snap together,” says construction manager and Algonquin student Jacob Morgan.

Such bumps along the way are valuable, according to Carleton faculty adviser Cynthia Cruickshank. “They’ve learned that it’s not like in class, they’re not always dealing with ideal conditions so they have to learn to create flexibility in the
design to deal with that.”

As part of the competition, each team (there is another Canadian one, Team Alberta from the University of Calgary and Mount Royal University) also has to host a dinner for eight to prove the house is functional. Says Baldwin, “We’ll do a Canadian menu, maybe Atlantic salmon.”

The small, comfy home in which they’ll do so boasts a devilishly clever design.

Outside, there’s 585 square feet of decking and, in front, a post-and-beam exostructure that serves as an architectural focal point while supporting a large array of solar panels. The solar array in turn provides shade for the interior.

Those panels will generate 7.8 kilowatts of electricity for sale to the grid. That’s as much electricity as the home will use in the course of a year, giving it net-zero status.

A tight building envelope includes insulating foam as well as state-of-the art vacuum insulation panels with 15 times the thermal resistance of conventional fibreglass-batt insulation. In all, ECHO’s building envelope has twice the insulating value of a conventional home.

Photo: Chris Roussakis
ECHO’s open and compact kitchen and dining area.

Inside, there’s an open-concept kitchen/living area with generous, south-facing windows to provide natural daylight and maximize solar gain during the winter.

There’s also a master bedroom with direct access to the deck and a small, second space for an office or child’s bedroom.

“There’s not a lot of storage,” says Morgan, “but our generation has to learn to live with less stuff.”

Multi-use furniture like a desk that becomes a bed in the second bedroom will help maximize space.

ECHO was designed using an in-out approach to architecture. That means that the interior layout, including the separation of living and sleeping areas and the flow inside the home — both especially important factors in a small space — are first established. That layout, along with engineering needs, dictate the floor plan and building shape.

Building materials were either donated or paid for through sponsorship. In selecting materials, the team used a “cradle-to-grave” approach that, for example, accounted for embodied energy and emphasized locally sourced, reused, and other
ecologically friendly components.

ECHO brims with emerging technology, including an advanced solar-assisted heat pump (SAHP) system to meet space heating/cooling and domestic hot water needs. There’s also a predictive shading system. It uses daily weather forecasts to raise and lower south-facing window shades automatically, reducing cooling needs on summer days.

ECHO, which would cost roughly $300,000 to build commercially, has involved more than 100 students from the proposal stage two summers ago to the completed project now. Says Baldwin, “It’s really nice to look out and see all the work we put in come to fruition.”

The future is here, or in Ontario to be more precise, where university and college students are building a net zero energy house to represent Canada at the Solar Decathlon worldwide competition organized by the U.S. Department of Energy.

The contest will take place from October 3 through 13 at the Orange County Great Park in Irvine, California. Its purpose is to allow students to plan, create, build and operate a house able to generate more energy than it will use over the course of one year, explained Mike Brown, 26, a mechanical engineer master’s student from Carleton University.

Brown is one of the members of Team Ontario, the Carleton University, Queen’s University and Algonquin College partnership that is competing against 19 other teams from around the world, including the Canadian team from Calgary.

Team Ontario counts more than a hundred students and faculty members who dedicate their free time to work on their house project called Echo. Echo because Team Ontario wants their idea to resonate for generations to come with one main purpose: to create a new standard of living. “The idea is to set a path to a more sustainable future”, Brown said.

To achieve a net zero house, the team will use both solar photovoltaic panels to create electricity, and solar thermal technology, which Brown explained, “does not use the sunlight to generate electricity, but stores the heat directly”. Wilkie Choi, a mechanical engineering student from Queen’s University, currently working on the project, explained their unique system: “It integrates heating, cooling, dehumidifying as well as domestic hot water demands”. For example, he explained, “when doing air conditioning, it is able to take the heat from the house and use it to generate hot water instead”.

Team Ontario is able to make use of a test facility at Queens University, where they are able to build and simulate the system. Portia Murray, 22, from the mechanical engineer team said, “We have a lot of people working on each individual component. Putting them together is definitely going to be a challenge”.

The U.S. Department of Energy launched its first competition in 2002; the contest has since taken place every two years. Throughout the years, the contest has brought together more than 112 teams, which are asked to submit a proposal in advance for the competition, according to their website. For the 2013 competition, less than half the teams that applied were chosen, said Christina Kielich, the U.S. Department of Energy press officer. Team Ontario first tried to enter the competition in 2011. At the time the group of students was limited to Carleton and Queen’s Universities, and even though their idea made it to top 25, it was not enough to compete. Their achievement however became an incentive for students to work harder for the next competition, Brown said. This time around the team was part of the top 20 group. This meant Echo had to become a physical reality, which; included its design, construction and testing.

Currently the team is in the construction phase, and one of the biggest challenges is that Echo has to be disassembled, shipped to California and assembled in about nine days, explained construction manager Jacob Morgan, from Algonquin College. Morgan also has a personal goal to achieve in California besides winning the competition. It is“to prove to ourselves that we can do better than what we thought”. Morgan joined the team in January 2011, and he is currently working with 22 other construction students at Algonquin’s Perth Campus on the construction of Echo. Tyler Warren, 20, another member of the construction team, saw the project as an opportunity to put his knowledge into practice. “My goal is to one day be able to build more of these houses all over the place, cut down electrical bills and also create a new kind of product to help improve housing development” Warren said.

Team Ontario was inspired by Ottawa’s weather to create the house’s system. Echo is projected to become a suburban home in Canada’s capital. “In the winter we run a working fluid called glycol through the solar panel that is able to absorb the heat from the sun and it will come into the house at about 20 degrees Celsius” explained Choi. “We then put it through a heat pump, which makes it even hotter and that gives us hot water to use as well for space heating”. In terms of electricity, he explained, they will use an array of PV panels, as part of a photovoltaic system. The system converts solar energy into electricity. “The goal is that over the term of a year it will be able to come out to be a net zero or net plus”, Choi said.

The competition consists of 10 contests. “These contests are designed to gauge how well the houses perform and how livable and affordable they are. Each contest is worth a maximum of 100 points, for a competition total of 1,000 points” explains the website link. To achieve it all, Team Ontario is a 100 percent sponsorship driven. Businesses or people, who would like to support the team, may do so by contacting Team Ontario on their Facebook page.

By the end of the summer Echo has to be ready for final testing. “We are planning on putting sensors all over the place, measuring heat transfers through the walls, the performance of different systems, fine-tuning things as we have to”, Brown said. Thus, the house has to be fully furnished according to the requirements. In the meantime, Jad Robitaille, 29, from Queens University, is helping her team stay on track, focusing on the interior design of Echo. Her job is to find out the sourcing of the material, making sure it is sustainable and local, Robitaille explained. Yi Quan, 20, is a member of the business team; she is in charge of the marketing, finance and accounting. She is also responsible for finding the different supplies and making sure that “each and every room fits with the other in terms of material selection and colour scheme”, Quan said.

As part of Team Ontario, with Queen’s University and Algonquin College, Carleton was selected to compete in the 2013 Solar Decathlon in Irvine, California. The multi-disciplinary team is building an affordable house that generates more electricity than it consumes. Two years of research, testing and building will culminate in the solar-powered house being disassembled and shipped to California for the 10-day competition, where it will be judged for cost effectiveness, energy efficiency and attractiveness. The house will blend affordability, consumer appeal and design excellence with optimal energy production and maximum efficiency.

Team Ontario will design and build a custom house, create models for measuring performance and, through research and testing, determine the most efficient systems and materials for insulation, hot water, appliances, home entertainment, and storm water use. In the process, students will have applied their classroom knowledge to create viable, real-world solutions for energy-efficient housing—and inspired the public to demand more from the next generation of homes.

Your support will advance intelligent housing design for the future by providing essential materials and research time to Team Ontario. Make a gift today to help Team Ontario shape the future.

Andrew Oneski and David Kolkman won the Best Overall Paper prize for “Formula Hybrid Race Car Control System’. Matthew Schiedel and Alex Hayes won both Most Innovative and Best Commercial Application Paper prizes for ‘High Performance Housing Project: Solar Decathlon’.

Between the two teams, their paper presentations won the overall championship.  Cynthia Cruickshank, from the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, was the organizer of the Carleton team that wrested the trophy back from the University of Ottawa.

Photo, left to right: Cynthia Cruickshank, Andrew Oneski, Alan Perks (Chief Judge), David Kolkman, Alex Hayes and Matthew Schiedel

A team comprised of students from three Ontario institutions is one of only 20 collegiate teams to earn a place in the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2013 Solar Decathlon Competition. Team Ontario is a partnership of Carleton University, Algonquin College and Queen’s University and will bring together students from a variety of disciplines, including engineering, architecture, advanced housing construction and business.

The competition challenges teams from around the world to design, build and operate solar-powered houses that are cost-effective, energy-efficient and attractive. All teams now begin an 18-month process to refine and build their home designs prior to disassembling them for shipping to the competition site in Irvine, California.

“Team Ontario is ecstatic to have been awarded a place in the 2013 Solar Decathlon in Irvine, California,” said Christopher Baldwin, Carleton’s project manager and student lead. “This competition provides a unique avenue for passionate graduate and undergraduate students to show case their work on an international stage. We hope to achieve our vision of a future where sustainable homes are a reality in the Canadian market.”

The team will be composed of a volunteer base of about 50 students. Together, their diverse skills and student experiences will ensure the design, funding and technological requirements of Team Ontario’s Solar Decathlon house are met.

“We are thrilled to have been selected to compete ,” says Cynthia Cruickshank, Carleton faculty lead and assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. “This event provides an unparalleled opportunity to promote sustainable buildings and renewable energy while showcasing the work of our students on the world stage. Our team’s net-positive energy home will capitalize on research and innovation while inspiring and educating the public to demand more from the next generation of homes.”

The houses will be judged on architecture, market appeal, engineering, affordability, comfort, hot water, appliances, home entertainment and energy balance. Last year’s competition homes were visited more than 350,000 times in 10 days.

More information on the 2013 Solar Decathlon can be found at http://www.solardecathlon.gov/.