A student design team from the University of Waterloo took home one of the top prizes from an international competition to design and build highly energy-efficient homes.
Warrior Home, which is made up primarily of engineering undergraduate students, finished first in the engineering category, one of 10 categories at the Solar Decathlon Build Challenge sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy.
Members of Warrior Home (l-r) Richard He, Isabel Crant, Adriana Ceric, Anna van der Heide, Pierre Roy, Renee Champion, Asjad Khan, Talina Sen Smet and Rebecca Damsteegt pose with their award at the Solar Decathlon in Colorado.
Winners in the two-year contest, which featured university teams from as far afield as Vietnam, India and Australia, were announced at a showcase event in Golden, Colorado this weekend.
The Waterloo team, which includes more than 50 members, is redesigning and retrofitting a 130-year-old house in Kitchener to become a net-zero, energy-efficient home for an Indigenous family.
The project was undertaken in partnership with the Kitchener-Waterloo Urban Native Wigwam Project (KWUNWP). Work on the two-storey house, which was donated to the KWUNWP by Waterloo Region after sitting vacant for several years, is expected to cost about $150,000.
Fifty-seven teams qualified for the finals, with Ball State University in Indiana finishing first overall, followed by the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.