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Taking a Look Around the School

8/21/2015

Much of the day was spent going around the school and trying to complete the energy audit that we started back when school was still in session. We started off with one of the rooms in the library, and used the Kill-A-Watt meter to determine the amount of watts certain objects were consuming. It turns out that many objects were still consuming quite a bit of energy despite there being no one around. Because we wanted to see how much each object would consume over a long period of time, we plugged the meter into a refrigerator in the teacher's lounge. When we come back next week, we will take a look at just how much the refrigerator is using, and by counting up the total amount of these in the school, we can determine how much energy all the refrigerators in the school to a certain degree.
We will spend time next week working on and revising the power-point in preparation for our presentation the following Wednesday. In addition to that, we will also continue working on our energy audit. Although the summer is ending soon, there is still much work to be done.

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Metasys is Back

8/20/2015

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After two days of Metasys being down, today it was up and running once again. We started off today brainstorming what we wanted to include in our presentation to important members involved with energy in our town. Then, we created an outline using Microsoft Powerpoint to whittle our ideas down to just the key few. Tomorrow will be spent working more on our upcoming presentation.
The rest of the day was spent extracting data from Metasys and graphing them. We created stacked bar graphs that compared the energy consumption during the night and day of our key control points.
Also, a key trend that was examined was that of the Collins Center. After asking the janitors to turn off the air conditioning during the day, the energy consumption reverted back to what it previously was. Hopefully, things will stay this way in the future.

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Metasys Problems

8/19/2015

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For the second straight day, Metasys was still not working properly. However, we still attempted to make the best of an unfavorable situation. After repeated attempts to try to find a solution, we could still not figure out what the problem was. We decided to talk to Dwayne, but we'll talk more about that later. The first thing that we did was to head back down to the Collins Center to check if there were any changes. And to our pleasure, it turned out that there was one considerable change that was made. After speaking with a custodian, the custodian agreed to turn off the air conditioning that is not in use. Once we got there, it was considerably warmer than yesterday. Hopefully, this will be reflected by less energy usage. While at the Collins Center, we also noticed that the lights used to illuminate the aisles were incandescent lights. This conclusion was made due to the considerable amount of heat that was emitting from the lights. This poses a problem because compared to LED lights, incandescent lights use almost 10 times as much energy. We took note of this and returned to the classroom.
After our trip to the Collins Center, we decided to do some hands on work involving light bulbs. This is a photo outlining what we did today.

Today Anil brought two meters with him to measure the current of three light bulbs. One, named Multimeter, cost $400, while the other, named Kill-a-watt, cost only $25. Automatically, we assumed that the more expensive meter would produce more accurate readings. After comparing the two readings of three light bulbs and calculating the percent difference of each, we found that there was a pattern among the three. The higher the current, the lower the percentage difference.

After a lunch break, we went over to ask Dwayne if he could help us solve the problem we have been having with Metasys. After spending a lot of time troubleshooting, we still could not fix the problem. However, Dwayne suggested to Anil to keep reinstalling Java until he gets the right version, as Metasys only works with one version. When Anil arrived back at home, he fixed the problem. As it turns out, there were a few missing environment variables located in his computer's settings that caused it to not function properly. Now that we have Metasys up and running again, tomorrow's action will be focused extracting more data and analyzing more trends.

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Taking a look at the Collins Center

8/19/2015

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This morning, we were planning on taking a look at the Metasys system to see what other information it would give us about the energy consumption in the Collins Center. Unfortunately, when Anil tried to log in, a message popped up that said that he is unable to log in. We initially attempted to call Dwayne, but all of our calls went straight to his voice-mail. Because of this, we were unable to properly take a look at the Collins Center. Instead, we decided to take a trip down to the auditorium to take a look for ourselves to see if we would determine the cause of all the energy consumption. Right before we went down, our new principal, Mr. Conrad, paid us a visit. He told us that he was very interested in what we were doing, and asked us if we could show him some of our findings. He told us that he was impressed, and that he would like to help us to the best of his ability. Afterwards, we headed on over to the Collins Center and made a few observations. One very noticeable one was that it was very cold. Although it is hot outside, the air conditioning simply does not need to be running during the day. Also, we found that the lights were still on on the stage, which is also unreasonable considering that no one is in the auditorium. One good thing that came out of this is that upon realizing how chilly it was in there, Anil talked to the janitors about the problem. They agreed to turn off the air conditioning. Hopefully, this will be reflected by less energy consumption when we look at the kWh used tomorrow.

Note:The information here is about the findings from August 18

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Back From Break

8/17/2015

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Today was our first day back from break, so we had some catching up to do. The first thing we did was to export the data collected over the past week to Excel Spreadsheet. We had data from 8/6-8/17 that covered all parts of the school, but our primary concern was to ascertain if the problem with the gym was fixed. On August 6, David, one of the technicians at Andover High, came and determined the cause of the excessive energy use at night and fixed it. Using the data over the last week, we took a look at the kWh consumed at night in the Dunn Gym. This is what we found.

It can be seen that in the days following August 6, the energy usage in the Dunn Gym decreased significantly and remained steady throughout the week. Now we know for certain that the problem we once had in the Dunn Gym has been resolved. Today, I made graphs that represented the energy consumption of each of the six panels at night as well. All of them were roughly what I expected them to be, but the graph of the Collins Center was very startling.

Very evident in this graph is the immense rise in usage that begins at 8/13. Now that we have solved the problem revolving around the mysterious energy consumption in the gym, our next step is to determine what's going on in the Collins Center.

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Our First Breakthrough

8/6/2015

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This morning was spent taking care of a couple of things. First, we headed up to the classroom with the iPad cart to check on how much energy it had been consuming. This was just an experiment of ours, and it turns out that the laptop cart consumed a little more than one kWh over the span of a day.Then, we took the data that we collected overnight using the Metasys software and created graphs of each sub-section of the high school. While we kept track of 6 different data points, the one that we were most concerned with was kWh. From graphs that we made in the past, we knew that there was a spike in energy consumption that started around the night time. Equipped with this knowledge, we decided to find the difference in kWh in each of the 6 sub-sections from 8 PM to 7 AM in order to determine how much money each sub-section was spending every night. This is what we found.

We determined how much money was spend in each sub-section by utilizing the fact that 1kWh = $0.16. The graph clearly shows that the gym is the biggest contributor to the mysterious energy consumption at night. Because this may just be an anomaly, we decided to wait and see at least a week's worth of data before rushing to any conclusions. Among the other big contributors include the lighting in the school as well as the Emergency-Security.
After we came back from lunch, we decided to look into electricity in the US. We found that since the US uses 110V instead of 220V, in order to achieve the same amount of power, the US would have to have two times the current compared to other countries with 220V. Because of this, we found that in countries with 110V would have to use 2 times the amount of aluminum to construct a wire of the same diameter. This comes to show that we are wasting resources over something that can be easily fixed.

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Berts and Metasys

8/4/2015

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Library Observations

8/1/2015

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This morning, we noticed that although the library was completely empty, all the lights and fans were up and running. A lot of energy was being wasted, so we decided to determine just how much energy was being consumed in the library. Because it is difficult to measure the energy usage of the fans, we decided to just estimate the energy usage of the lights instead. Equipped with the knowledge that each light has roughly 80 Watts, we estimated that the library uses roughly 16,160 Watts per hour, or roughly 16 kWh. Because 1 kWh accounts for $0.16 in energy costs, 16 kWh costs the school about $2.50 an hour. We realized that this was something that needed to be fixed, so we began to brainstorm ideas of how to solve it. This is a costly problem that can be solved with lights that turn on only when the library is in use, so that the energy can be conserved when school is not in session.

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