Tiny House
This project was focused around heat, how it moves, and how to conserve it. We did multiple labs to learn as much as we could about heat and its properties. The first lab we did was that we built solar water heaters.
The goal of this lab was to try to learn generally about how heat moves, and the best ways to heat it up. The diagram you can see above should give you an idea of about what our group was trying to do. The gist of it is that no matter where light hits on the reflector sheet, it should bounce back and all hit the tube filled with water in the center. This works because every parabola has a focus, which is where all the light intersects, which is where we put our copper tube filled with water. We used a copper tube because it is a good conductor, which means that it heats up faster, and it transfers more of its heat to the water. We came up with this idea quite quickly, and then spent most of our time trying to find out where to place our tube, as to get it directly in the focal point of our rough parabola, which we did fairly well, resulting in a good final product.
The second mini-project was a small experimental house to test out different day-lighting techniques. We built small representations of things like solar shelves, clerestory windows, solar tubes, skylights, and windows and put them onto a small house. We then did our best to test the effectiveness of these different lighting mechanisms by moving an open light bulb past it in different arcs to represent the path of the sun at different times during different seasons.
After our day-lighting lab we did a lab based around specific heat capacity, which is how much heat an object can hold, which affects how fast its temperature changes when exposed to heat. Each group was given 3 materials to test. We set up our heat lamps 1 foot above the counter, with cardboard underneath the material. We checked the temperature every minute, for 5 minutes with the lamp on, and 5 minutes off. We learned from this lab that materials with a lower specific heat capacity heat up and cool down faster, because they don't hold as much heat. On the flip side, this means that materials with a high specific heat capacity heat up and cool down slower, keeping them about the same temperature.
Without further ado, here is my group's actual presentation.
During the process of making our houses, we had another lab about wind power and what makes the best wind turbine. Each group was allowed a lot of room to do almost whatever they wanted while making their wind turbines. My group ended up making a small turbine out of a thin, flexible wood for the blades. We did this so that we could test how much and in what direction of bending is the most effective for getting the most rotational speed in a high wind environment. We came to the final conclusion that a slight, longways bend is the best for picking up speed, because it helps pick up maximum air, while also reducing the amount of air hitting the other side.
Reflections
I feel like this project went fairly well, but there were multiple drawbacks. The first of these being that we did not have a good system of communication between different people doing different things. The large problem we had was that we put finding the lowest cost materials over finding the materials best suited for the job of making a real house, which led to a very strange looking cost list, where our end cost fell thousands of dollars below what the minimum amount of money for a tiny house is seen as. Despite this, our group was very good about delegating tasks to different people and giving them dates or times when they should be finished, or at least at a certain stage in the process. Also, we had a high work ethic, but we realized late into the project that that effort was going in the wrong direction, like when we chose rubber roofing with raised walls because it was the least expensive, not stopping to think about real-world problems, like how rain would collect on the roof, with no other way than manual labor to get it off. Overall, I felt like our group worked well together, but we needed to be able to refocus ourselves individually and as a group, and remember the actual purpose of the project.