Pulling Your Shades

The Importance We believe it is important for all of the window shades to be pulled down every night in District 206. It would save on the cost of heating the school by a small amount of money, but when the money saved by every school is combined it turns out to be a lot of money and energy saved.

How Window Shades Help In Jefferson, the windows are about 30 years old and they are not very energy efficient. The windows let in so much cold air that a beaker of water left at the bottom of the window will freeze. By pulling the window shades, it keeps the warm air in, and the cold air out.

The Cost of Heating In December of 2009, it cost $16,920.86 to heat Jefferson. If by pulling the window shades, we could reduce our heating cost by $40 a day, that would equate to $1,200 a month. Over the school year we’d be able to save up to approximately $9,600. If all the schools did this, the net income saved would be $76,800 in one school year.

Our Experiment In our experiment, we wanted to know how much heat the window shades keep in. We had 3 windows in our experiment. There was a beaker of water at the bottom of each window. There was 40 ML. of water in each one. There was also a thermometer suspended above each one, adjacent to the brim of the beaker.

Our Experiment continued The temperatures were recorded three times. On December 10th at 1:15 pm and 2:25 pm and on Monday the 13th at 1:00 pm.

Reason for the Tests The reason I'm doing this experiment is to prove how pulling down window shades can save heat and insulate our buildings.

Window 1 has its Window Shade up. Window 2 has its Window Shade down all the way and the beaker is in the room. Window 3 has its Window Shade down but the beaker is in between the window and the shade.

Temp. of Suspended Thermometer Test Results Is the Water Frozen? Temp. of Suspended Thermometer 12/10/10 1:15 Window 1: No Window 2: No Window 3: No Window 1:50 Degree’s F Window 2:53 Degree’s F Window 3:46 Degree’s F 2:25 Window 1:48 Degree’s F Window 2:54 Degree’s F Window 3:44 Degree’s F 12/13/10 7:30 Window 3: Yes Window 1:39 Degree’s F Window 2:45 Degree’s F Window 3:32 Degree’s F Window 1:45 Degree’s F Window 2:48 Degree’s F Window 3:39 Degree’s F 12/14/10 Window 1:41 Degree’s F Window 2:44 Degree’s F

Future Thoughts We hope that these result will help our schools realize how important it is to pull down the window shades and save energy, and money. It’s better for our environment, and our schools. We also hope that this presentation will increase your awareness to this problem. We hope to attain a grant for more energy efficient shades for our school, and possibly others in the district.