Passive Solar!
The goal of this project was to design San Marin High School's new STEM buildings, with a budget of 10 million dollars. This was a clear upgrade and challenge from other classes project, normally with a budget of one thousand dollars, with the goal to build a small shed or other small building. Other requirements included 10 separate classrooms, including two biotech labs, two chemistry labs, and six regular classrooms, plus a storage room. This will be fun!
Conserving funds
In order to reduce electrical costs, we decided to use day lighting, essentially, attempting to maximize the amount of natural light in the building. Before we could attempt this on a model, we built a test house. From this we learned two things: first, skylights and windows are good for getting in light, and two, we aren't very good at putting in other light sources. But the test taught us how to get light into a building.
Tested day lighting technique tested
- Clerestory windows: Windows positioned above the home, designed to let in light, not for looking out of.
- Sun tubes: Small tubes that collect light and defuse it into a room or hallway.
- Sun shelves: Shelves on the outside of windows, reflect light into the room
- Skylight: We cut a hole in the roof, simple as that.
- Window: We cut a hole in the wall, simple as that.
Planning for the school
As we learned from the test house, windows work and we aren't good at finding other ways to get light in effectively, we dropped the daylighting and decided to focus one the layout of the building. After much reworking, polishing, we had a decent design that met all the requirements, with minor daylighting elements.
Review
To be honest, we probably could have done more to figure out how to use solar tubes, sun shelves, and other day lighting tools, but due to time limitations we were unable to. Another short coming of my own was the use of our graphic design software, which I had next to no prior knowledge of. I feel my lack of knowledge stalled the team, but I feel that they picked up the slack fairly quickly.
Two parts that went really well was how quickly we adapted to the need for constant hot glue when making the test house. The job of fetching more quickly fell to Kian, while I kept the house together. Secondly was how quickly we dropped the day lighting techniques when they took too long. While we could have done more with them, it would have taken longer to build.
Two parts that went really well was how quickly we adapted to the need for constant hot glue when making the test house. The job of fetching more quickly fell to Kian, while I kept the house together. Secondly was how quickly we dropped the day lighting techniques when they took too long. While we could have done more with them, it would have taken longer to build.