The best and greatest value ideas from Solar decathlon (and Central Texas!)

I'm jealous that Passive House Jake is at this year's solar decathlon.  I visited it in years past when I was stationed at the Pentagon and it's really amazing what great, innovative ideas there are out there from our university students.

This one from the University of Maryland caught my eye and I believe it's in first place so far:

"Watershed" from this year's solar decathalon - nice ideas

This drought makes me realize we must use both rainwater and grey water as smartly as possible and as you can see, this house implements the necessary technologies.

Innovative, outside the box thinking is happening here in Central Texas, too.  This weekend was the start of back to back weekends of home tours, solar tours...this weekend was the local home tour.  Saw some wonderful homes but mostly what we anticipated - traditional.  Still, one home caught both Jen and my eye in Killeen:


 Relatively simple floorplan, with a loft/4th bedroom upstairs.  This minimizes the metal roofing total square footage.

I can't say we 100% loved this home but its interesting roof - relatively low angles likely with optimum solar panel angles made me realize that there is a way to design enough "breaks" in a roof line to make a modern, contemporary home interesting without being over the top in terms of the other homes in the neighborhood.

Nice mix of limestone, metal roof.  Interesting and ideas worth implementing in our home.

Finally...this is my idea of a great "outdoor room."  Great size to take advantage of the Texas climate (well not today - we broke a record with a 106 degrees :(

Next weekend  - the family is off to Austin to round out the ideas.