Energy Savers

Explanation of the topic:

As we know, energy does indeed play an integral role in our daily lives, in our homes, our cars, our

place of work or our industries and schools, for example.

Of course, we use different kinds of energy for different purposes: Most of the petroleum we

consume is used in the transportation sector; heating, cooling and electricity, for our homes; and

industry consumes energy derived from fossil fuels and a lot of electricity.

But leaving this aside, our project is going to focus in the electricity that is used in Begoñazpi School. After several tests we have realized that the amount of electricity we spend every month is too high; and lowering it is good for us: not only because we save money, but also because it is better for the environment.

Objectives

Our main objective is to change this shameful situation, getting energy without damaging the environment and saving money that otherwise could be invested in renewable electricity supply systems, LEDs...

So, taking all this information into account, we have considered three mini projects:

Change our short-lived bulbs for more sustainable ones.

Install PV solar panels.

Create a kind of day, Energy Day, where students will investigate more about different ways to turn on energy savers, which include: a project to encourage students to support energy saving, creating energy in PE classes by using different forces; and this day would be without using electricity.

In this way the electricity consumption will decrease considerably and we are sure that everybody at school will be grateful with us with these changes.

Hypothesis

If we change the short-lived bulbs with the sustainable ones, we are going to save a lot of money and energy because while the bulbs we have now are useful for less than 1000 hours, the other ones last 3 times longer.

If we buy and install solar panels we can take advantage of a lot of solar energy. This way, we will not  have to buy a lot of electricity.

If we organize an Energy Day with the different activities we are going to program, the students will learn that saving energy is really easy and profitable.

Testing step

We have done three research works where we check that the change of the bulbs would be successful, that the solar panels could be very helpful in order to avoid many environmental problems, and we have verified that our Energy Day is going to be amazing for all of us.

On the one hand, we contacted by email with our researcher and he told us that our proposition of changing the bulbs we have nowadays by LEDs would improve the problem we have now. He helped us giving some really useful information about them and we concluded that we can save much more money than we thought. On the other hand, we also spoke about the PV-s with another engineer, and taking advantage of his experience in some other cases with these  PV solar panels, he told us that it could be a brilliant idea.

Finally, we have done a questionnaire to 25 students and teachers from our school, from different levels. Taking into account the different answers, we concluded, making some graphics, that the idea of an especial day is fantastic (91% of the people who had answered the questionnaire agreed with our idea).