Temperature control, whether heating water for a bath in winter or cooling a bedroom on a blazing summer day, is essential to a comfortable home.

It is hard enough to get selected as one of the 20 university teams to participate in the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon, then to spend two years designing and building a competition house on campus, and finally to transport that house to the Solar Decathlon competition. But now it’s a race against time to reassemble the house at the competition site in California in just nine days.