The Gable Home was designed and built by students to compete in the 2009 US Dept. of Energy's Solar Decathlon Competition. Following the competition the house returned to campus and was located at the I Hotel until Spring 2017 at which point it had to be moved due to the expansion of the research park. Since then a team of students and faculty have been working on finding a new permanent location for the Gable Home and gathering information to determine what costs would be involved in putting the building on a permanent foundation with all required connections to water, sanitary and the electrical grid. A suitable location was found at the Energy Farm on Race St. in Urbana and the project is now ready to move forward this semester.

The house is a valuable educational tool for students from many units on campus to visit and experience occupying a space that is powered solely by the sun and uses passive and active systems to create desirable thermal comfort throughout the year.  Monitoring systems were originally installed in the house to collect and present real time data on the performance of the solar array along with key parameters of the house environmental conditions.  This data would once again be available for student classes and research projects.