For our end of the year project, we are going to one of the schools in Boston to conduct an experiment with high school students.  On my team are Brianna, Amanda, Colin, Irisa, and myself as the team captain.  Since this project is for our Sustainability, Energy, and Technology class, we knew we would have to choose an experiment that we could relate to the course.  After looking through the list of experiments on the website provided by Dr. Shatz, we decided we wanted to do the experiment called “A Good Sock”. This experiment uses glass bottles to test insulation.  In this experiment, which we will conduct next week, we will be filling these bottles with warm water, then covering them with cotton and wool socks.  Once the bottles have the socks on them, we will monitor the changes in temperature for each using a temperature probe.  The experiment is fairly quick, only 25 minutes!  After the 25 minutes are up, we will record our results and make a graph displaying them.

Last week we created our outline and our lab handout.  The outline consists of the reason why we are conducting this experiment, background on insulation, the procedure, what data needs to be collected and how it is to be collected, and questions that go along with the experiment.  It also includes a diagram depicting how insulation works. The lab handout is a less detailed outline of our experiment.  This week we started our PowerPoint presentation and will complete it on Tuesday, November 18th, once we have completed the experiment.  We also decided this week we will add another glass into the experiment and leave it uncovered.  This will be to see how much heat escapes without any insolation.

Good insulation in a building or home will make the place energy efficient.  Insulation works by creating a barrier between areas of different temperature.  This means in the winter, a well insulated house or building will use less energy to heat because the cold air is not allowed to enter and the warm air is not allowed to escape.  In the summer, it is the same except hot air is being kept outside and cool air is not escaping to the outside.

The less energy need to control the temperature in an enclosed space, the better because becoming energy efficient is critical in the quest to create a more sustainable environment.