This was a competition invited by the Department of Energy and they wanted us to build a zero
energy house.
That was the mandate there, which is that the entire house is off-grid and for five
days we have to survive entirely on what we produce.
So yes, it's a two-year process, it was a long journey ahead of us and we had to think
twice before whether we were going to take it on or not.
But we did take it on and in between all of these conversations was the fact that we
also wanted to play and to experiment with this project and you don't want to stop that.
Designers, they get an opportunity and they want to experiment.
So what came out as you saw in the images, in the physical manifestation of the ideas,
was the translucency emerging as a key concept and a key idea of the house and then it came
upon us to have to support it over the span of two years and then to build it and have
it operate and compete.
So we said, okay, we'll figure something out.
So we decided to come up with a process or analytic strategy that would take us from
the virtual to the real of the house and this sort of summarizes our storybook of the analysis
that spans two years and goes from idea level analysis to the actual physical part where
we simultaneously projecting, predicting as well as monitoring what's going on in the
house.
Okay, so they gave us this roof.
It's a translucent roof and it has to survive for six days.
What are we going to do about it?
Initially, we looked at it and these are hand sketches, hand calculations by a student in
June 2006 and this is 2007.
That time we decided this is not going to work and then we decided to reverse engineer
and said, okay, what do we want out of it?
And while Franca was working frantically on that sketch up there, I was making calls to
Germany every day trying to figure out the density and the specific heat capacity and
telling him, no, this is the R value we want.
Anyways, we dealt with it but then simultaneously at the same time what was going on was other
geometric analysis of the roof which is that how are we going to angle these panels and
what should be the spacing between them?
And that became interesting.
You saw in the mall that all the panels were tilted differently.
Then another thing that if we tilt them, we have a limited roof area.
If we shade them, we're going to lose power.
So that became another sort of ground to explore.
How do we put them out so that they don't shade each other?
And then the reason why the whole premise of this thing was to shade the translucent
roof.
So is it really doing that if we space it far enough so that they don't shade each other?
So that was another iteration of analysis.
So what I'm showing you is snapshots from an analytic book that filled up very quickly
over the two years.
Okay, so this is the graph for an ideally balanced house.
This is what we would want in an ideal world.
You match the supply with the demand.
You have more supply and that's when you consume more.
And in a second, you'll see what our house looked like, which was this.
And if you see, this was the period we were competing.
And there you see a complete opposing dynamics.
We are consuming much more than we have.
So we said, okay, now let's attack the design options again and see what can we do.
Can we convince them that this is never going to work?
So we frantically started exploring any and every option that how can we balance this
house so it resembles the ideal better.
And this is, you see a series of options we explored.
And the interesting thing here was that what we had, with all the translucency, did actually
work okay except for the intermediate season for which we were supposed to compete.
So we said, okay, we can't reduce our consumption because that's what we have to do in the competition.
Let's increase the supply.
But where to increase the supply?
Southwest.
We don't have any roof space anymore.
So we started looking, okay, whether to stick the panels on the south wall or the west wall,
where to put them in, and south wall they went in.
And then, of course, we started getting more fine grained because Franca would come up
and say, so what do you want the height between the weatherproofing and the insulation layer
and, of course, you don't want to let that opportunity go.
She's giving you some freedom there.
So you say, okay, I'll tell you and so you figure it out.
But anyways, over and above we had to remember that this is a competition and we had to compete
and these are actually the results from the competition.
So both the subjective where the juries evaluate us and the objective scores land up making
a huge difference and we thought we knew it all.
We knew how to handle it.
You know, we had figured out worst case scenario, lowest temperature, worst case scenario, highest
temperature, normal scenarios, whether we will drive the car, whether we will not drive
the car, whether we will run the house, we thought we had it all under control.
But it was a game and this is the first day.
So the red bar you see at night when we left, where did our energy go?
We were controlling the temperature, humidity, everything perfectly.
We never ran the heating before we constructed the house in the mall.
So the heating system sucked everything.
Okay, so it was a game of what to do or what not to do and we realized that the next morning
we came back and we saw that drop.
And these were all the things we had to do which would score us objective points, which
is run the house and do all these activities like cook, run the shower twice a day, things
that you normally don't do in your house, much more, 200%.
Okay, and then we played the game.
We said, okay, now we are playing.
And then we started computing every activity that we did per points per kilowatt.
So we played well.
Day two, we were very proud.
Day three, oh, we were super proud.
We played and the sun helped.
And then we had some phantom loads, so to say.
