A Busy Week

Congratulations, Warriors, on a very busy and productive week!  Our yard sale was a big success, raising $190.  Kudos to Neshaya for organizing that, and thanks to everyone for helping out, manning tables, recruiting customers, and rounding up donations.

Alyssa and Macy Selling Like Crazy

For our project we did a lot of work to understand how much energy is required to heat water, how much water needs to be heated to start a shower, and how much energy is required to keep heating it while the shower is running.  We also learned how quickly the heat is lost once the shower stops, whether its through plastic or copper pipes, 1/2" or 3/4" diameter, and insulated or not.

Lais Heating Water

Nick Logging Data

Cooling Rates for PEX Pipes

With all of this information we should be able to figure out how much it costs to operate different solutions to our problem of wasted water.

We also worked on prototypes of our innovative solution.  Existing solutions either heat the water whenever it goes cold, or else whenever it gets cold within certain hours.  Using Lego controllers, motors, and sensors, Hannah built a hot water re-circulation system that only turns on if a) someone enters the bathroom, and b) the water is cold.  It then recirculates the hot water until the water in the pipe is hot, and then stops.  It does this by sending Bluetooth (wurd of the week)  messages from an EV3 that would go under the sink, to a second EV3 at the water tank which would turn the water on and off.  Congratulations, Hannah!  If we make no further progress we've at least got a working prototype of our system.

Lily and Olivia worked on the missions for Zone 1 over the weekend and can fairly reliably do the Water Filtration and Pump Addition missions, with good progress on the Rain mission as well.

This week we hope to make more progress on the robot missions, and to look for ways to improve or reduce the cost of our prototype solution.