The BYU house is actually being built! The past few days were crunch time since deliverable #5 was due yesterday. Needless to say the three students who are working on the project this summer have been glued to their computer screens to get that in on time. Today some of the team went on the site to hammer out some details about the layout for the construction site. We also got our hands dirty (quite literally) cleaning up the lot, moving things around, and tossed some old equipment that was going to interfere with the home. It was a nice change of pace from desk work! Thanks for following the project to this point! Now there is going to be tangible proof of all the work these students have been putting into the project. Updates will be coming more and more frequently.

The Orange County Sustainability Decathlon is focused on helping California specifically and the competition is run from Orange County California but is still being open for any national college to compete and participate. Their goal is to promote good, energy and water efficient building practices much like the National competition Solar Decathlon. There are two application processes and two different grants awarded. Brigham Young University's team has officially been given the "approval to proceed" for BOTH competitions and are ready to move forward to building. For the Solar Decathlon Build Challenge, the measurements will be done on our build site in Spring of 2023 at BYU's campus. For the OCSD, our dome will be transported to the event site where people will be able to walk through and enjoy it in person in October 2023.

Some of the local issues our community is struggling with is lack of space because of a growing population boom. Our goal, as the Wasatch Builders is to implement sustainable building practices into construction while finding ways to make the home cheaper and more affordable. The name of the project is the Hogan, which was the name of a local Navajo dwelling structure, they are a domelike underground home built with sticks and adobe. Often as an industry we are stuck in our ways of the traditional style home and the traditional building materials and methods. This is what limits innovation so we are going back to the lands native roots and trying a home inspired by the Navajo earthed dome structure. This house will consist of dome-like “pods” which are elongated and modified so they can be mobilized for transport to Orange County Solar Decathlon. Each monolithic dome will be constructed with the help of Monolithic Industries, a company centered on building these super structures. We are opting to use a modified recycled concrete to build the structure and then semi-berming it with the earth to form the “Earth effect”. The green roof on the structure will include plants, shrubs, and possible grass to provide each ecosystem in the biodiverse community of Utah an opportunity to survive and thrive. When the home is buried there are a few main benefits. 1) Earth Effect on Heating and Cooling 2) Aesthetic appeal/ open space 3) Protects the structure and weather membrane 4) Reduces "heat island" effects you see in the city

The United States Department of Energy has been putting this competition on for 20 years this year! 5 members of our team were able to travel to Golden, CO and spend the weekend with other colleges competing from around the world. We came home with lots of new ideas AND the approval to move on to the build portion of the competition! Follow this blog to see as we go onto construction.

One of the main problems we are noticing in Utah is this unbalanced market. According to local real estate agents, there aren’t enough single-family homes to meet the rising housing demand. A balanced market has roughly a six-month supply of houses, which means that if we stopped listing new properties, we'd still have about six months before we ran out. And right now, Utah is down to about four weeks of supply of homes. We are building in Iron County Utah which is outside of Cedar City. This is a college town and has some really awesome attractions like the Shakespeare Festival and breathtaking National Parks. For these very reasons the city is growing and if it is anything like the other Utah college towns, there will be a gap in the market leaving only apartment complexes and expensive homes. According to the National Real Estate Association 2021, 82% of homebuyers are looking for single family detached housing. So our home is targeting a single family in the middle class and we intend to make the home more cost effective for construction and maintenance.