This past week, I met with Jim Knowlan to discuss the water bills of Building 10. I need the bills in order to figure out how much water is used, so i can figure out how much water would be saved. I got all of the billing information all they way back from 5/31/08 to 9/1/09. I found out that there is a down payment of $13.72, and with that, 7.5 CCF's are included. 1 CCF of water, is the same as 784 gallons. Water costs $1.0921 per CCF, which is extremely inexpensive. That kind of took the price evaluation part of that part of my project out, just because water is so inexpensive, but I am still going to the the evaluations, because in the end, there might be a big difference. This week, I am working on finding out the amount of water used in the course of a year. After finding that out, I will discuss with Harry Courter (my outside consultant) about how much water these plans would save. I am meeting with Mr Schade on Friday to discuss my portfolio and my rubric. I talked to Ms. Parkes earlier, and i decided that concerning on portion of my project, I will have a taste test, with bottled water (Poland Springs, Dasani) and water from the water fountains at ross, that I will be filtering the water using a PUR filter. I will be doing this to show people that filtered, water-fountain-water, can be just as good, or probably better, than bottled water.
This past weekend I met with Harry Courter, my outside consultant, to discuss my project. My previous plan was to use the water from the sinks, to water the sports fields. Bad Idea. We decided that soapy soccer fields wouldn't exactly the best playing conditions. So instead of using the sink water for the fields, we decided that we would collect storm water (the "official" term for rain water), put it into a big storage system, and then water the fields with that. The second idea that I had, was to use the sink water for the toilets. The problem with that, is that the current toilets, which are called suction toiets, would not be compattable with this idea. In order for this to work, we would have to replace these toilets, with pump toilets. Surprisingly, it would not be a very expensive change. We then, would put a system with a small filter on it, and connect it to the toilet, so that water from the sink, would directly flow into the toilet. If there is not enough water coming from the sink, regular water would compensate, without it being very obvious. The third idea, is to get rid of the water coolers and cups (I'm sure the environmental commitee will be very interested in this idea), and make use of the water fountains again. Many people do not use them, because they feel that the water is dirty and it does not taste as good as the Poland Springs water. This is because the water is town water, the same water that is used in the toilets in the sinks. My solution to this, is to put a central filtering system on the water that goes to all of the water fouintains. It would eliminate the carbon footpring from bottling the water, and driving it all the way from New Jersey ( That's right, Polands Springs water is from a bottling plant in New Jersey, not from some exotic spring in Europe). It would probably also be better quality water than Poland Springs. As of now, I am trying to figure out all of the numbers that will help me figure out how much water is being used, how much will be saved, as well as the price evaulations.
