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Schools

University of Maryland Wins Solar Decathlon

Here's a photo tour of UMd.'s WaterShed house, the winning solar-powered home in the Solar Decathlon.

The University of Maryland won first place Saturday at the .

UMd.'s WaterShed emerged from a field of 19 solar-powered houses constructed by college teams from around the world, combining the features of affordability, consumer appeal, design, energy production and efficiency.

Check out the photo gallery with this post. The captions explain how parts of the house work.

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UMd. finished almost 20 points ahead of second-place Purdue and more than 32 points ahead of third-place New Zealand.

Each house was judged through 10 contests, half of them by a point system and the other half by a panel of judges. Maryland earned first place in the architecture contest, beating New Zealand by one point in that contest.

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Maryland also received all possible 100 points in the hot water and energy balance contests.

Maryland placed 12th in the contest measuring affordability. A professional estimator had the construction cost for WaterShed at $336,335.89.

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