Design Phase II

During this week's meeting our group established some more guidelines for our design project as well as various other details of the overall Dorm Energy Competition.

Choosing a Dorm:

During this week's meeting we established that the competition would most likely take place between two dorms instead of by floor. We also decided that the freshman towers provided the best competition grounds for a few reasons:

1. All the floors are even. One of the main reasons Frear was abandoned as a competition dorm was the fact that the floors are uneven. By this I mean that some floors have a laundry room, some floors have a study lounge each of which consumes various amounts of energy and gives floors unfair advantages over other floors.

2. Fulfills one of the goals for the competition. One of the goals is to raise awareness about energy conservation as early as possible. By using the freshman dorms as a competition we are able to reach students at the earliest possible stage and hopefully raise awareness that will stick with them throughout their academic careers and beyond.

Other Guidelines:

We also determined that we should have weekly floor leaders in order to promote healthy competition among the students on the floor. Ideally we would like to have lcd screen in the dorm lobby displaying such stats as the current dorm energy usage, the past week floor leader as well as various other data about the floors and their energy consumption. Additionally we reviewed the 3 main goals (which can be found here) of the competition and adjusted our guidelines as well as the way we educate the students in order to meet the 3 goals.