Otterbrook Farm

By: Jordan Kania, Emma Mellon, Sylvie Holding

Over the past couple of weeks our science class has been learning about convection, conduction, and radiation.  We had a guest speaker, Ted Stiles.  He came in and talked about his career as an energy auditor. He goes to houses and helps people figure out ways to save money on energy costs. After learning more about the ways that heat can be lost, we went to Otterbrook Farm.  There we saw multiple examples of heat loss.  It can be lost from poorly insulated walls, ceilings, ducts, windows, beams, doors, floors, and many more.  While there our job was to figure out where the house was losing the most heat and suggest ways to fix it.  Ted also helped us learn the different types of insulation and the R-values of each, and where each belongs.  

When we got back we had a project on convection and conduction of heat loss.  We had to make a water bottle holder that would reduce heat loss.  The limitations to this project where that it had to be no more than  5” in diameter and 10” in height.  Also we had to use the insulation provided however, we could bring materials from home as well.  After we built the holder we were instructed on how to measure the temperature of the water every minute for 30 minutes using a labquest.  After 30 minutes of the labquest test, we discovered with our design, the temperature of the water only rose 1.2 degrees celsius.  In our class we had the lowest change in temperature out of seven groups.