Solar-powered homes often are touted as saving on electric bills. But a unique house built by Drury University and Crowder College students can also save lives.
The students, with help from architecture professors, have designed a portable solar-powered home they say can survive an EF-5 tornado.
The house was assembled at the Crowder College campus in Neosho and is on its way to the national Solar Decathlon competition in Irvine, California, where it will compete against other solar homes designed by 20 colleges around the country.
The home will be moved to Joplin after the competition, where a family who survived the devastating EF-5 tornado in 2011 will get to live in it.
"This is what we did to make our home stand out from the others — make it able to survive an F-5 tornado and show what is possible using solar," said Evan Melgren, a Drury graduate who worked on the solar home with others over the past two years. "I would live in this, for sure, not only because it's safe, but because of its design perspective."
Traci Sooter, Drury professor of architecture, said students saw a need for a small, self-contained solar-powered home that could quickly be transported to a disaster site and be up and running on its own in just a few hours.
They came up with a modular home with a flat solar-panel roof that generates more electricity from the sun than the home needs — including heating and air conditioning.
The two rectangular units can be joined to make an emergency living quarters able to accommodate eight to 10 people, Sooter said. The home can be enlarged and made permanent by setting it on a sturdy concrete foundation, separating the two units and building a strong roof between them.
The center becomes an open living-room area protected by impact-resistant Lexan windows, with sleeping quarters in one unit and a kitchen and bathroom in the other.
Sooter said the Drury and Crowder students came up with a way to build a triple layer of "armored" walls on the home's exterior that testing showed would withstand hits from tornado debris traveling at 200 mph or more.
The first layer is a steel-and-aluminum panel "fence" that takes the brunt of the wind. Behind that, a layer of strong fiber cement cladding, like armored drywall. And behind that layer, panels of quarter-inch thick Lexan plastic, similar to what is used to make bullet-resistant windows.
The three outer layers protect standard wood-frame walls made of 2-by-6 timbers.
Half-inch steel rods every four feet tie the roof to the solar home's steel foundation, making it almost impossible for tornadic winds to lift the roof and blow it away, as often happens with wood-frame homes.
"There's nothing sacrificial about this house. It's designed to stay together and is a big design idea with this home," Sooter said. "After Joplin, 3 million cubic yards of debris went to the landfill. This home is designed to save people, property and the planet by not filling up the landfill with storm debris."
Jarren Welch, a graduate of Crowder College's solar-power program, said the home has 42 solar panels covering 900 square feet of roof space. The panels, like much of the building material, were donated by companies interested in furthering innovative home design.
The solar panels generate way more electricity than its occupants need, so they could sell it back to a utility or let neighbors hook up to it after a disaster. The home stores its power in batteries and also has two 300-gallon tanks of water for drinking and washing.
"If I was living in Joplin, or any tornado-prone area, yes, I'd live in a home like this," Welch said. "It protects the inhabitants and saves lives."
The Solar Decathlon requires entries to cost less than $250,000 to encourage solar-powered homes that are cost-effective, energy-efficient and attractive. The competition is sponsored by the Department of Energy, which grants teams $50,000 to pay the cost of shipping the entries to the competition judging site in California.
Sooter said she couldn't yet say what the cost of the Drury-Crowder home would be, if someone wanted to build one based on the design.
Some of the roof and foundation steel was overbuilt to withstand the long trip to California, she said, and the contest's $250,000 limit doesn't factor in lower manufacturing costs in southwest Missouri.
She hopes some companies might take an interest in the students' design and possibly bring a version of it to market.
"I hope this is the future because Joplin was just awful," she said.
Winners of the Solar Decathlon will be announced in mid-October.
Who is competing in Solar Decathlon?
The Solar Decathlon competition began in 2002, and was held again in 2005, 2007, 2009, 2011, and 2013.. Here are the teams competing in the 2015 Solar Decathlon:
• California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
• California State University, Sacramento
• Clemson University
• Crowder College and Drury University
• Missouri University of Science and Technology
• New York City College of Technology
• State University of New York at Alfred College of Technology and Alfred University
• Stevens Institute of Technology
• University of Florida, National University of Singapore, and Santa Fe College
• The University of Texas at Austin and Technische Universitaet Muenchen
• University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
• University of California, Davis
• University of California, Irvine; Chapman University; Irvine Valley College; and Saddleback College
• Vanderbilt University and Middle Tennessee State University
• West Virginia University and University of Roma Tor Vergata
• Western New England University, Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá, and Universidad Tecnológica Centroamericana
• Yale University.
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