The students received a NASA grant to explore how the school can save energy on air conditioning and water consumption.
Standing on a roof, architecture student Justin Cullen looks like he is going to go base jumping.
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He wears a harness and is attached to a lifeline so he doesn’t fall off the edge of the Technology Building on Fairmont State’s campus.
Instead, Cullen is pulling a sunshade off the side of the building.
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It’s a part of a project he and Kiley Wilfong, another architecture student, are testing this summer to help reduce the school’s energy costs.
The students are studying solar heat gain. They used PVC pipe, duct tape, and foam insulation to build a small sunshade.
They covered a fourth floor classroom window with the sunshade, comparing temperatures in that room with the room next door.
The room next door is shaded by traditional window blinds.
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Kiley Wilfong says the sunshade keeps the room consistently lit without increasing the temperature.
“We found that it’s usually about four degrees cooler in the room with the sunshade than the control room with the blinds,” she said.
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The students believe the use of sunshades can cut the costs of cooling rooms with air conditioning throughout the summer months.
They also say the school has a unique opportunity to become a model university in saving energy and becoming greener.
The second part of the project involves water consumption.
The students placed two water meters in one of the bathrooms on campus.
For seven days, they monitored how much water is consumed at the bathroom sink. Then, they replaced the aerator on the sink.
An aerator is the nozzle which controls how much water is released during use.
Justin Cullen says the new aerators are saving several gallons of water.
“Our original averages were around 40 gallons of water a day. That’s just an outstanding number,” he said.
“We put on our aerator, and we used about a third of the amount of water.”
The old aerators released more than two gallons per minute. The new aerators release less than half that amount.
Architecture Professor Phillip Freeman is advising the students.
He says there are two reasons why these methods are not used more often to save energy.
“There are design issues; you have things hanging over your building, so how do you integrate that,” he said.
“The other question is it’s more expensive to add things like sunshades and water saving devices,” he said, “we have to make them understand that in the course of two or three years, that up-front cost is paid back.”
The students plan to present a report to NASA with the results from their research.
They’re hoping Fairmont State will consider making changes based on their findings.