Hey everyody,
I would like some suggestions/critiques/etc on a project I am doing for school.
My school has an initiative where they use a dollar from each student's tuition to go into a pool of money that is used to finance student-led "green" or "sustainable" projects.
The student organization I am in wanted to create a simple project centered around energy monitoring in dorms and discover if having a non-invasive, personal energy monitoring device (meaning it plugs into an outlet then you plug devices into the monitoring device, like a Kill-A-Watt) in a dorm room would be effective in energy reduction and/or creating behavioral change regarding energy consumption among student residents. Even though its not a real technical project, we wanted our younger members to get some research experience.
In short, we got funding for the project based on the idea that we would install two of these devices in a participant's room, instruct them to plug all of the devices they would normally plug into a common outlet into these devices(and keep them there), and then track the consumption for a baseline period(two weeks). We would then instruct the participants to use the 'energy saving plan' feature of the device to create a plan to reduce their consumption by a particular percentage from the baseline value (i.e. if Participant X's baseline total energy consumption was 10 Watts a 20 percent reduction would be 8 Watts.) We would then track the weekly total energy consumption for 8 more weeks.
Things we would be able to measure would be the time that the participant spends on the devices user interface, the type of savings plan they created, and as stated before the weekly total energy consumption to everything plugged into the device.
The problem my team is having is that we are trying to figure out if this is enough data to show any substantial result. What we have hypothesized is that what this would show would be that the more a participant uses the device, the higher energy reduction value they would obtain (or atleast they would achieve whatever reduction plan they set in the device).
But we were thinking is this enough? Can we do more?
Other questions we had were what would we need to have a control group to help answer the question of how much more reduction could be achieved with a monitoring device as opposed to having no device at all?
One suggestion was that we make a "common energy usage profile" of a hypothetical student in the dorm by using past energy usage data (monthly usage of the building from the past 5 yrs in KWH and the cost per month) along with the number of students in the residence hall. An issue we had with doing this was that the profile would include the lighting of the building and other energy using equipment that wouldn't be factored into the data we collect from the participants use of the monitoring devices.
Also we figured to have a real control group(and not a profile) would mean that we'd have to monitor their usage with some sort of device. But that raised a concern about accuracy of the control group's data knowing that their energy would be monitored.
I know this is kind of alot of stuff but I am looking for opinions. The main issues we want to address are:
-Can monitoring devices work(help reduce energy) in a dorm room
-If they can, by how much? How can they work better?
Thanks for reading
Mike
I would like some suggestions/critiques/etc on a project I am doing for school.
My school has an initiative where they use a dollar from each student's tuition to go into a pool of money that is used to finance student-led "green" or "sustainable" projects.
The student organization I am in wanted to create a simple project centered around energy monitoring in dorms and discover if having a non-invasive, personal energy monitoring device (meaning it plugs into an outlet then you plug devices into the monitoring device, like a Kill-A-Watt) in a dorm room would be effective in energy reduction and/or creating behavioral change regarding energy consumption among student residents. Even though its not a real technical project, we wanted our younger members to get some research experience.
In short, we got funding for the project based on the idea that we would install two of these devices in a participant's room, instruct them to plug all of the devices they would normally plug into a common outlet into these devices(and keep them there), and then track the consumption for a baseline period(two weeks). We would then instruct the participants to use the 'energy saving plan' feature of the device to create a plan to reduce their consumption by a particular percentage from the baseline value (i.e. if Participant X's baseline total energy consumption was 10 Watts a 20 percent reduction would be 8 Watts.) We would then track the weekly total energy consumption for 8 more weeks.
Things we would be able to measure would be the time that the participant spends on the devices user interface, the type of savings plan they created, and as stated before the weekly total energy consumption to everything plugged into the device.
The problem my team is having is that we are trying to figure out if this is enough data to show any substantial result. What we have hypothesized is that what this would show would be that the more a participant uses the device, the higher energy reduction value they would obtain (or atleast they would achieve whatever reduction plan they set in the device).
But we were thinking is this enough? Can we do more?
Other questions we had were what would we need to have a control group to help answer the question of how much more reduction could be achieved with a monitoring device as opposed to having no device at all?
One suggestion was that we make a "common energy usage profile" of a hypothetical student in the dorm by using past energy usage data (monthly usage of the building from the past 5 yrs in KWH and the cost per month) along with the number of students in the residence hall. An issue we had with doing this was that the profile would include the lighting of the building and other energy using equipment that wouldn't be factored into the data we collect from the participants use of the monitoring devices.
Also we figured to have a real control group(and not a profile) would mean that we'd have to monitor their usage with some sort of device. But that raised a concern about accuracy of the control group's data knowing that their energy would be monitored.
I know this is kind of alot of stuff but I am looking for opinions. The main issues we want to address are:
-Can monitoring devices work(help reduce energy) in a dorm room
-If they can, by how much? How can they work better?
Thanks for reading
Mike