Jeremy Forsythe's days begin at 7:30 a.m. this summer. That's when he and a crew of 10 to 12 students start to work building a solar-powered house on the Carnegie Mellon University campus.

	Bill Wade Dianne Chia a fifth-year architecture major at Carnegie Mellon University, works on the roof of the house installing a window. Click photo for larger image. Related article Pittsburgh Synergy house: It's all in the details

But as the days of summer have grown shorter, their work days have only gotten longer.

"At the beginning of the summer, we finished by 3:30," said Forsythe, project manager for Pittsburgh Synergy, this year's local entry in the Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon. "But then it was 4, then 4:30 . . . now it's 5:30 or later," he said during a lunch break last week. "We were here until 6:15 yesterday. I think it's only going to get later."

Indeed, the students from Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh and the Art Institute of Pittsburgh have just five more weeks to put the finishing touches on the 800-square-foot house, now rising in the green hollow known as Donner Ditch.

It then will get broken down, trucked to Washington, D.C., and reassembled on the National Mall, forming a temporary solar village with 17 other competitors from such schools as Michigan, Virginia Tech and Texas.

As with the inaugural event three years ago, this second Solar Decathlon is intended to identify and celebrate the innovation necessary to build homes that generate their own power, rather than simply consume it.

"We have to do something to alter the consumption of fossil energy," said Stephen Lee, a CMU architecture professor and the faculty adviser for Pittsburgh Synergy. With gasoline prices surging and higher prices for heating oil just around the corner, Lee said public interest in energy conservation promises to be much greater than it was during the first competition three years ago.

"We're just going to be inundated in the Mall with questions from the public," predicted Lee, referring to the open house Oct. 7-16 when the public can tour the solar village.

Some items, such as the house's $40,000, 5-kilowatt photovoltaic array, were hard to get this year because of high demand, particularly in the West.

Carnegie Mellon and Lee participated in the first Decathlon, but this time around the team was expanded to take advantage of talent at the Art Institute and Pitt and to incorporate materials and labor from the broader community.

Last week, for instance, the team received a shipment of donated windows from Traco on Tuesday and donated steel roof panels arrived Wednesday from Follansbee Steel in Weirton, W.Va. The Pittsburgh Builders Guild has provided trade apprentices to perform electrical, carpentry and plumbing tasks and the Hardwood Manufacturers Association has provided lumber.

None of the students who participated three years ago is still in school, but Forsythe, who was then in his second year of CMU's five-year architecture program, saw enough of what was going on to be intrigued.

"I love working with my hands," he explained, so the idea of designing something and seeing it through construction has appeal. Likewise, the green design concept "is just common sense, it's just smart," he added. "You try to live in harmony with the world around us."

After he and classmate Kevin Wei spent a summer designing and building a deck on Cape Cod, they went to Lee two years ago and pushed to once again form a local team to compete in the Solar Decathlon. Eventually, a core group that included fellow students Dianne Chia and Xian Huay emerged.

"The house was essentially born last summer," Forsythe said, during long nights of drawing and model building and then refined during a design charrette with visiting German architecture students last fall.

Insulated and airtight

As with any energy efficient house, this one is heavily insulated and kept as air tight as possible to reduce any loss of energy. Air gets exchanged in a typical home 1¹/₂ times every hour; Pittsburgh Synergy's exchange rate is one-fifth of that.

But the students also made some unconventional decisions. Like the previous team, they opted to include a loft to reduce the house's footprint, but this time they chose to put many of the house's heavy mechanical systems, including a large storage tank for solar-heated water, in the loft rather than at ground level or below.

"It makes perfect sense in a house with limited space," Wei insisted of the second-floor mechanical systems. "By raising them up, you free up a lot of [first-floor] space for living." Efficient use of space, which enables space to be reduced, is an important aspect of energy efficiency, he said.

"I think a lot of people are ready to live better with less," he added.

They also opted to sheath the house's north face with a translucent polycarbonate structural sheet, which contains air pockets for insulation.

"Basically, it will be a glowing, white wall," Wei said. In addition to diffuse light, the wall also will transmit shadows of people working inside and passing outside the house. "People really play a part in activating this house," he added.

Lee, meanwhile, shared hard-earned experience from the first competition. One concept he stressed was KISS, or keep it simple, stupid. In the first house, the CMU team tried to design a combination heat pump and solar hot water system that promised to be innovative, but turned out to be too complicated. Pittsburgh Synergy opted for commercially available "mini-split" heat pumps for cooling and kept the hot water system separate.

Attention also was placed on breaking down and reassembly of the house. In the first competition, all parts of the house were small enough so that an individual could lift them. That made it easy to move each piece, but made for a lot of pieces. Lee said the team ended up spending a lot of time in Washington just assembling the house, with little time left to get it operating efficiently.

Pittsburgh Synergy is designed in large pieces that can be moved by crane. It took four hours to assemble the major pieces earlier this summer, Lee noted.

The house project is budgeted at $400,000, with $250,000 in cash already collected and another $100,000 in donated labor and materials; some additional cash donations are needed, Lee said.

Once the competition is over, CMU has a $155,000 grant from the Ford Motor Co. to reassemble the house on campus, where it will become a new home for the university's Steinbrenner Institute for Environmental Education and Research.

"I like the idea of it being a permanent place for people to visit," said Deborah Lange, the institute's executive director. The loft will become her office and the great room will be a conference room.

The right angles

The experience has been valuable, Forsythe said. The students were able to build each of the major pieces so that they lined up when put together, but not without a lot of sweat. "You can draw a 90-degree angle on paper very easily," he noted. "It's a lot harder when you're trying to join two heavy pieces of lumber."

"It's really exciting to see something that's been in your head so long begin to go up," Forsythe said. "To see this building take shape -- it's just wild. Like today, I'm just standing here going, 'Man, we have windows!' "

With classes set to start next Monday, however, the work days are only going to get longer.

"We'll probably get some work lights from Home Depot and just end up sleeping here," he said.