Smart Cities Tiny House ERA

Introduction

Hello, my name is Edmond Lascaris and I'm a Local Government Officer at the City of Whittlesea in Melbourne Australia. I work in the Sustainability Environment Department and for the last ten years I've been doing outreach program in locals schools and libraries teaching sustainability using environmental sensors. The sensors give students real data on the world around them and I think this makes the subject matter more real and tangible to students.

Raspberry Pi

It all began back in 2012 when the department I was in had a little money left over to do waste education in schools. The Raspberry Pi computer had just been developed in the UK. If you're not already familiar with the Raspberry Pi it is a small credit card sized computer that only costs a few tens of pounds. It was designed to encourage more young people to start hacking and learning about technology. You just need plug in a monitor, mouse, keyboard and a small power supply.

I used the small amount of funding available to buy some Raspberry Pi computers and then rang around to different universities to see if they had old computer equipment. One university (La Trobe) said yes and that allowed us to build a computer lab for Lalor Primary School.

Teh original funding was to help support waste reduction and here we had saved some computer equipment be re-purposing it for a primary school.

The school was fortunate the make it to the finals of the Victorian Government's Premier's Sustainability awards. They didn't win but it showed that this little computer was living up the promise of making computer literacy more accessible to schools and helping to tackle an electronic (e-waste) problem at the same time.

The name Raspberry Pi evolved because several great computers were named after fruit. The Pi is not the mathematical ratios for circles, but rather is a shortening of a computer language called Python.

Platypus project

The focus of my work at Local government relates to maintaining healthy waterways. There had been a series of pollution events at a local waterway in 2017 that were possibly affecting the health of local platypus in the Plenty river.

I was teaching students at a local library and collectively we decided to work on an environmental sensor to help detect these pollution events.

This was my first real experience with building sensors, sending data and analysing it on a Raspberry Pi. The students took up the challenge and helped launch the sensor.

From the student's perspective it was like working on a satellite for a space program.

They needed to use solar PV panels, they had to work on energy management systems and batteries. They worked on the communications equipment and the small computer brain within the sensor. They also entered their project in a local ICT competition called teh Young ICT Explorers competition and finished second in the state.

Whittlesea Tech School Epping

Now I teach mainly at the Whittlesea Tech School. Secondary students come to do a Smart Cities course. We specialise in building sensors and analysing the data on the Raspberry Pi, building Dashboards so that the data can be easily visualise and interpreted.

Climate Change

The students are acutely aware of the challenges of Climate Change. On the one hand Australian has been devestated by intense bush fires. In 2019 cities on the East coast of Australia were blanketed in smoke. Fires destroyed millions of native animals, tens of thousands of hectares of bush, destroyed homes and killed more than 100 people. Extreme heat and drought conditions had helped make this event more extreme.

Australia also has to grapple with floods and more intense rain events. The incredible Great Barrier reef has also been subject to more frequent coral bleaching events.

Carbon emission reduction

The solution is to reduce our carbon footprint.

One program that got us thinking was Grand Designs in the UK. What grabbed my attention was the technical language relating the energy efficiency in these new structures.

Many of them were Passive houses meaning that with the right amount of insulation, air tightness, orientation and thermal mass they could almost be energy self sufficient.

Smart Cities Tiny House

What is the Smart Cities Tiny House course about?

The Smart Cities Tiny House course grew from many influences. A Tiny House is a tangible project that is available to students at school. Interest in Tiny Houses is growing because of the high cost of living and housing. Ironically, if you build small you can also invest in technology and materials that will keep your house cooler in summer and warmer in winter. It becomes a simple housing model for students to explore.

If students have the experience of building and testing their own Tiny house at school they will be better equiped to make more informed decisions when building, buying or renovating their own home later on.

Understanding how best to invest in a house to improve thermal conform and energy efficiency is not easy. There are many elements at work.

The activity is broken down into Three key components:

• energy calculations for the Tiny house - for example, calculating heat gain and heat loss through a wall or window
• materials and equipment used to build a Tiny House - insulation, air tight membranes and even heat exchangers
• Enviornmental monitoring equipment for the Tiny house - temperature sensors and the ability to log and monitor changes

Hence the Smart Cities Tiny House course was born. Over the last 4 years the students have been building the foundation for this course. Tiny Houses would be a good solution to high energy costs because they can be designed to be warmer in winter and cooler and summer if properly designed.

Tiny House Wall

The aim is to build a small Tiny House that can be built by students. The construction will include special insulation for the walls and air tight membranes.

Here is a mock up of a wall section.

Once the Tiny House is built the students can do energy calculations. It is much more interesting doing calculations on a Tiny House that you've just built. And once the principles are known these same calculations can be applied to their own homes or school.

Tiny House Energy

The Tiny house has a solar PV panel and battery to provide enough energy to power lights, raspberry Pi computer, laptop, mobile phone, electric bike, refrigerator, etc.

A Raspberry Pi computer connected to the PV system can tell the students how much energy is in the battery, how much energy was collected during the day and how much energy different appliances draw.

The assembly of the electronics can be done safely because all energy sources are removed and only later connected by adults away from the students. However because the students have built the system they can connect with the data.

Importantly they can mentally equate battery sizes, solar PV sizes, and appliances to energy flows and losses. In a Tiny House you need to manage energy carefully, something that we will all need to do in a low carbon future.

Tiny House Temperature Sensor

So how do you test to see if your Tiny House is really performing as it should?

You add environmental sensors such as temperature sensors inside and outside the structure and you gather data. This strategy invites Enquiry-Based learning, collaboration and sharing.

Students have an objective to make their house as comfortable and low energy as possible. If its hot outside - how can they keep their house cool on the inside.

There are a variety of strategies they can use. A large thermal mass inside their house will help to delay heating. Insulation helps too. Vegetation on the outisde of their house will help prevent direct solar gain. They could use the thermall mass of the Earth and ground to help bring cool air into their house.

The same is true for cool temperatures. How can they keep their occupants warm. Humans generate 100 Watts of heat. Can we use their better. Can we capture more energy from the sun to keep us warm.

In all these experiments simple temperature sensors can give vital clues about how each student team's Tiny House is performing. And each passing season presents new challenges and opportunities for improvement.

Building Temperature sensors

Some students in secondary school in the UK may want to build their own temperature sensors for this project. Instructions are provided. The temperature sensors are connected to little computers and send their data to the internet. This way they start to experiment with what is called The Things Network.

Energy Efficiency in Schools

Based on the experience in the Smart Cities Course it is really easy to teach students how to access data from sensors placed in their own schools.

The data obtained from Centrica can be read using a special URL (web address) called an API. This allows all of some of the data to be downloaded to a Raspberry pi computer. Students can then save the data and learn to display the data in a Dashboard they create. They will learn how to code in computer languages such as Python and Node-RED that are provided for free on the Raspberry Pi and are easy to learn.

The lessons can be made simple enough for students aged 9 and 10, and lessons can be developed all to challenge students up to the end of their high school years.