The goal of this project was to build a tiny solar house that was energy efficient inside out with all materials. The first part of this project was to test materials under the sun(heat lamp). We aslo made a solar water heater with different matterials. Also we made a model of our tiny house and tested it with the sun(lamp). It went pretty well I thought. Some times we worked more efficiently then others, but we got it done!
There is a graph of the local sun patterns. This is relevant because we need to know how the sun works and build or solar home accordingly.
All this is is tin foil wrapped in a box. Then a water bottle was tapped to the middle of the box.
This is our water heater deign, it is very simple. All you need to do is put a water bottle in the middle. The sun and tin foil do the rest of the job and heat up the water. It stands on a wodden block that gives the direct angle for the most effective heat from the sun. This was really cool to build. for such a simple design we were surprised at how it worked so efficiently.
Daylighting techniques and experimental house
Our design here is once again very simple. This is our first design. We have lots of solar tubes and skylights. We also many windows around the facility. We covered the exterior and interior with white paper to absorb the most heat and light. My favorite addition is the light shelfs you can see there on the wall. It reflects light and puts it directly into the house.
Here are the graph and table for the material heat testing lab. The goal of this project was to find the best materials to build in our tiny house. We put them under the heat lamp. That heat lamp was supposed to represent the sun. We took the temperature of the materials at o minutes, 5 minutes, and 10 mins.
The Tiny House
Click to set custom HTML
This presentation, in my opinion came out so well considering we started the same day it was due. The presentation really shows most of the work and explains our house very well.
These are our blueprints. We all kind of worked on it at once, but I would really like to thank Ryan and Henry for really taking charge when Nihal and I had to do other things. They really killed it. It was a huge asset to our project.
Materials list
Our materials list is very good. It is very through, it has literally everything we used in the tiny house. It has everything from all studs to the tv we used. We all worked on this simultaneously.
3D Model
I worked a lot on the 3D model. We all had contributing ideas though. At first we had to come up with the shape of the house, then all the stuff in it. we thought to represent that all was in a 3D model.
Wind Turbine Lab
What we did for this lab was we made little miniature windmills and tested them. We got to see how much energy they used and tried to find what kind of wind turbine design was the best. We made a Claim, Evidence, Reasoning poster. Here it is
Content
Solar Angles During Seasons
The sun moves at different angles depending on the season(the earths tilt). You want to base the angle of your roof and windows based on the angle of the sun. For example in the winter you want to most light to keep it warm in the house. And in the summer you don't want much light in to keep it nice and cool in the house. The angles change because the earth moves on an axis. During each season the earth tilts at a different angle. That would explain how it is much warmer in the summer, than the winter because the earth is more directly exposed to the sun. As opposed to the winter where the sun is hitting the earth at more of an angle not creating that same heat.
Daylighting Techniques
There are a lot of daylighting techniques you can use wen building a tiny house.
Southern facing windows- Southern facing windows are the most effective because the southern side of the building is the side that will potentially receive the most sunlight throughout the day.Color choices- The optimal color you want is white. The reasoning behind that is that white reflects light the best. So if you have an all white room it will be really bright, almost too bright. Realistically don't use white, use a light color that suits your preference to reflect the most light.Specific Heat Capacity- Specific Heat Capacity is the amount of heat a single object can take. You can find it by using this formula:c = ΔQ / (m × ΔT)c: Specific Heat , in J/(kg.K)
|
|
Reflection!!!
This project was differently the longest one so far and definitely the most intense. I had a really good time working with Ryan Loeber, Nihal Nazeem, and Henry Zhang. They were really good group mates and in my opinion we really got the job done. What we did well was we had a really good start. I felt that in the beginning of this project we worked very predictively. We just seemed to get the job done well and really on time. We also did a good job of working collaboratively. We slip up the tasks fairly well and we all got along. Now for what we didn't do so well on. Like I said in the beginning we worked very well, but it was in the end were we kind off slacked off. We only did work in class, didn't work very hard in class. Our mentality was, or alt least for me was like "oh whatever ill do it later". I think the reasoning behind that was that it was such a long project. I think we lost interest after a while, I mean the project did last forever.
But the good thing is that we can admit to those mistakes. And next project really change our mentality. Some things I would work on personally is stay engaged the whole time. Like I said I kind of slaked off in the end. Next project i need to be productive and work well the whole time. What i learned about my self is that I can be one heck of a worker. I mean you have seen it in this website update. I am not even kidding i have spent 6+ hours doing this thing. I think I was able to do this was because i applied my self. When i apply my self i can really work efficiently. Thank you so much fro taking the time to read my website update.