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New Water Catchment Group-

Welcome to 5th grade and the Water Catchment Group. We hope you will use kaizen and improve our water catchment system and add to the blog as well.

Thank you,
2012-13 Water Catchment Group

Job Description: Rough Draft

This will be updated regularly.

You are expected to remember the following.

Franklin Harding, Wil Harrison

Noah Brown, Alex Cheriel

May 07, 2013

We are the water group, we do regular maintenance on filling up five gallon water jugs and lots of other things, monitoring water in the aquaponics. One favor that we have is to keep on the urinal project. So far we calculated that the urinals waste 671,760 gallons of water and $2,985 per school year. We raised awareness by telling the PPS board about this horrible problem.

One of the most important things about our green team is not forgetting to do maintenance. Filling up water jugs every couple days and filtering it to go into the aquaponics is very important. If there is not enough water in the aquaponics, the whole system will fail. Instead of racing off to play soccer or basketball or whatever, spend a few minutes in the garden at recess.

We regularly update the program (Programmed in VB.NET and C++) and reprogram it, the c++ one has the dementions to enter though. If you are not familiar with programming in VB.NET please get VB.NET for dummies, it is extremely simple and helps you learn how to get programming ASAP.

You will want to use systems thinking and see how you can stack functions [leverage] and try to avoid unintended consequences. In systems thinking it is okay to make small mistakes but observe it and know not to make that mistake again.

Kaizen (continuous improvement) is also very important Class of 2011-2012 started raising money for the water bottle filling station and us (the class of 2012-2013) finished it. This is kaizen. Creativity is a big part of kaizen.

Most important: Be slow and steady like a tortoise and not fast without thinking like a hare. For example don’t run off during discussion before you know what to do.

Our Blog:http://winterhavenwatercatchment.blogspot.com/

You can use Mr. Thompsons account to edit it, ask him for the password.

You are welcome to edit the blog and put information about green team that you want on it.
Our Website:watercatchment.webs.com

Board Meeting Speech

Board meeting speech 5-6-13

We installed a water bottle filling station in our school to increase water quality and convenience. This will decrease spillage of water down the drain and save plastic bottles. We’ve saved over 1,000 so far.

Frank and I developed a simple program to calculate how much water can be saved by water catchment. This will save water which can be used for other things.

When rain falls, it picks up chemicals and brake dust and washes into the river. We collect rainwater that falls on our roof to prevent this from happening. Right now we have one rain barrel, but there is potential to catch over 600,000 gallons on our rooftop.

We conserve water by catching rain and using its multiple purposes. Rainwater is used for watering plants and to fill the aquaponics. After going through our filter, we can drink it! This is good leverage, buying water from Bull Run is expensive and it has to travel miles to get here.

Our school urinals flush incessantly. We calculated that 671,760 gallons of water and $2,985 are wasted each year. Isn’t PPS always looking for money? Here’s a great opportunity!

One of the systems tools that we used was the iceberg model.

Official Website.

The water green team has a website:
watercatchment.webs.com
Please feel free to check it out and sign up with your personal email, not winterhavenwizards.
Thanks!

Urinals

I made a mistake calculating yesterday. I said we we would save close to thirty thousand dollars but it turns out we only saved 2,985 dollars. Still this would be enough to buy another water bottle filling station and some quality school supplies. And for lots of other schools in the district that are larger than ours, the district would get lots more money for much more important things.

We waste 671,760 gallons of water in our small school, so that's not anywhere near what it is like in some high schools. They must waste at least - my goodness, it must be near a million!

Alex