In April, Purdue University kicked off a three-year undertaking to prove that high-performance dwellings needn’t necessarily be built from the ground up with all the innovative, energy-saving bells and whistles already attached.  Read more by clicking here.

Launched in partnership with Michigan-based home appliance behemoth Whirlpool, the ReNEWW House is a living laboratory in the truest sense: the home’s tenants, graduate students/engineers enrolled in the Whirlpool Engineering Rotational Leadership Program (WERLD), are researching and living in the home during two-semester stints.
Explaining that the basic aim of this deep-green conversion project is  “is to take an old home and see what we can do with it,” Eckhard Groll, Reilly Professor of Mechanical Engineering and director of Purdue’s Office of Professional Practice,” also notes that the process of transforming a leaky old bungalow into a tightly sealed, solar panel-topped research project has been a challenging one. “We struggle. It’s not that easy,” Groll, who is serving as the ReNEWW project lead, says. “We wanted to set a far-reaching goal to get people thinking about it.”

Head on over to the ReNEWW homepage to check out energy consumption data and view a complete list of project sponsors. Builder Online has also a nice overview of the project.