The solar village residents made an item for the silent auction in an attempt to make more money for the current Solar House project. They all agreed to make different dishes utilizing ingredients from the green house and prepare a fabulous meal. Christina Adams from the Environmental Research Center won that dinner bid. The dinner turned out to be a high class blast with enough food for her family and the village tenants. Along with her humor Christiana even added to the dinner meat from her grass fed cows!  Fried Zucchini and a couple of vegetable dishes can be seen in this picture below.

Fried Zucchini is fairly easy to make. All it takes is breading it and letting it fry a little in corn oil. Put enough corn oil in pan to cover bottom and put on high heat. When frying make sure to always have something in the pan sizzling. Bread the zucchini by mixing a couple of eggs, flour and water. You can use milk instead of water if you would like a little different consistency to the breading. After dipping the sliced zucchini, fry it golden brown and add salt. This all takes literally like fifteen minutes to do and is tasty!

One of the vegetable dishes was a salad dressing mixture of vinegar and olive oil. It involved the combination of onions, cucumbers, tomatoes and herbs. By Julie Glenn

Thanks to Ten K Solar our Chameleon house looks extremely spiffy! They helped to hook us up with the tenK RAIS PV system that is their trade mark. It’s a system that combines PV modules, reflectors and the racking all put together. When this was mounted to our flat roof a beautiful wave like pattern appeared. This system provides more kWh per square foot because of its high density energy production. What makes this system truly unique is the way if any part of this module is disrupted, say from shade for example, the rest of the system can still act normally. You only lose a few percentage points of output. To get technical the actual cool aspect of their solar module is the way connections go both directions on the actual panel in a mesh grid. This is verses the alternative which is wiring in a series. Compared to other panels that could be affected majorly in the energy production department if a weather incident occurs, this tenK RAIS PV system will just keep chugging along. If it ever does encounter weather damage the module can be replaced and the new module will freely be mixed with the other modules.

Maximum power point tracking wired parallel can accept reflections. You can see in our Chameleon House roof picture that the multi colored window like apparatus reflects light and increases light energy consumption by a lot. It reflects because its coated by 3m film that will only allow rays that can be used to be reflected. The rest gets passed through the glass to prevent heat build up. Efficiency jumps to 160 percent of the rated output with this panel and coated glass combo.

Safety is kept in mind with this system also. The tenK RAIS PV system only works when attached to a complete circuit. An advantage is it does not work during installation and firefighters can get this thing powered down with a kill switch so to say.

This company has headquarters in Minnesota and they have had great customer service with a passion for making solar project dreams come true with as low as cost as possible. Don’t be afraid of their unbelievable deals they have. It’s just this company has the passion behind them to make as much solar panel systems as possible and to help businesses and customers latch into the Solar Movement! Please check out their website and get inspired on top of the inspiration you may experience following our Chameleon House Journey!

http://tenksolar.com

Blog by Julie Glenn

The windows we are using for our Chameleon House are pretty clear and tough as nails. (The last comment is because I have bonked them a couple of times with nails when trying to do border work.) We utilized the made to order windows because of course the reason of energy efficiency is kept in mind. We wanted to promote that environmental effect of greater efficiency by using inert gas* filled insulated glass. This is heavier and denser than air and it is just being energy smart by utilizing this. Thus, the reason for having an energy star rating. These windows feature the actual Solarban 70XL glass from PPG ideascapes. This Solar Control Low-E Glass provides a clear picture and a type of performance that’s astounding. The glass is a transparent coated deal that includes solar control characteristic and low-emissivity. Block solar energy but let in as much visible light as possible and folks let me tell you that’s innovation right there. It can provide lots of savings in upfront cooling and even annual energy savings of up to 13 percent when being compared to the subpar dual-pane tinted glass. This factor of saving cooling costs equates to big time carbon foot print reductions and in fact when used for industrial buildings it can reduce thousands of tons of carbon emissions over its lifetime. If you are working on replacing those old windows in your home consider using the ones from Crystal Window and Door Systems.

By Julie Glenn

Information pulled from Website: http://www.crystalwindows.com*argon, argon/krypton blend

Check these windows out with a heavenly glow from the sun!!

The team had a great time meeting with one of our professional advisors, Tom Wilson.  A few members were able to give him a tour of the Solar VIllage so he could see all of our previous houses.  We then had a very productive meeting with him in the SDELC.  He had a chance to look over our plans for the Chameleon House and suggest things to help improve the design based on his experience in working on many other projects.  It was great to be able to meet him and his advice along with the rest of our advisory panels will help this be our best house yet.

After Tom left all of the team leads were able to meet and work on the budget and our scheduled for building the house.  It was a very productive meeting for all of the leads and we all got a lot of work done.  Overall it was a very productive day for the team.