Team Ontario/BC members come together from the eastern and western reaches of Canada for a trial run of the competition dinner party menu.
This rendering of North House set against a Western Canadian landscape shows the shading covering the house's floor-to-ceiling glass. These windows and the vertical PV panels that form a frame around them are designed to maximize capture of low-angle winter sun.
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Project Manual (Zip 8.5 MB)
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Team Ontario/BC set out to tailor its Solar Decathlon house to the Canadian climate. "Because we are a Canadian team, we wanted to design for the north, show how to make things work in the north," says Toktam Saeid, a mechanical engineering Master's student at Ryerson University. "We therefore have to deal with extremely cold winters and hot and humid summers."
Designing for northern latitudes also means taking a different approach to passive solar heating and solar electric panels. The team could not count on much power from rooftop panels in the winter but could make good use of low-angle sun for much of the year. Thus, the south, east, and west sides of North House have floor-to ceiling windows framed by vertical photovoltaic (PV) panels. How will this northern design work in Washington, D.C.? "No problem. October in D.C. fits what we are designing for in summer months," says Saeid.
Team Ontario/BC—or Team North, as they refer to themselves—includes students from three schools: the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Ryerson University in Toronto, Ontario, and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. Lauren Barhydt from Waterloo says: "The hardest part really was to build a house that comes apart. The ability to disassemble and reassemble was often the limiting factor."
North House is designed to be a "celebration of the small home" and to be light and airy with a strong connection to the outdoors. As such, it features floor-to ceiling windows on three sides, vertical PV panels, and one large multifunctional room in which nearly everything folds away when not needed.
Highly insulated, quadruple-glazed, floor-to-ceiling windows and vertical PV panels on south, east, and west sides to capture northern latitude winter sun are the key features of North House. Other technologies include: