Liam Whelan Miss Joyce 8G
It is important to maximise coolness and minimize energy consumption because if we can reduce the amount of energy we use and still stay cool then we are helping to stop global warming. Here are some house designing tips to help stay cool without having to turn on the air conditioner:
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Paint your house walls white or a light colour to help reflect the heat from the sun’s rays,
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Make your walls really high with fans to drag the hot air out because hot air rises and the higher your walls are the more room there is for the hot air to move around and escape,
 The way your house faces because his means that you can get cross ventilation through your windows and you can get sun in the rooms when you want it there, (such as avoiding summer sun shining into your house in the afternoon)
 Sky lights in rooms that need light because this way you don’t need to turn on the lights when the sun is out,
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Louvers instead of normal windows because they can open up fully so there is a total air flow,
 install solar panels so that you don’t use as much energy from the grid which means that not as many fossil fuels have to be burned,
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Install insulation in the roof and walls that have a lot of sun light hitting them so that not as much heat gets through into your house
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And planting trees around your house to create more oxygen and to provide shade for the house.
All of the houses that would require cooling are in the northern hemisphere of Australia (See
Picture 1), This is due to the heat that we get in Queensland, Northern Territory and Western
Australia. In Queensland and the Territory the heat is humid and sticky whilst in Western
Australia the head is dry so the cooling is required in all of these places.
The strength of the design feature we have chosen out of all others to test would have to be that it will give us a good look at which roof design would be the best to keep our big design cool and energy efficient, the weakness would have to be that it is difficult to get all the design features that are needed in the roofs at such a small scale.
INT Scientific Report Date Due 12-11-10

Liam Whelan Miss Joyce 8G
The aim of this experiment is to try and discover which roof type would be the best to keep a house cool without the need of air conditioning. This discovery will be made by putting an ice cube into three different rooms that have three different roof types.
We predict that the ice cube in the flat roofed house will melt the fastest. This is due to the fact that there won’t be as much room for the hot air to move keeping is close to the ice cube.
The house with the pointed roof will melt slower than the flat roofed house, this is because there is more room for the hot air to move keeping it away from the ice cube for longer.
Finally, the house with the skillion roof (the weird shaped roof that you see on energy efficient houses) will melt the slowest, this is due to the fact that there is even more room for the hot air to move and there are little louvers in the top so the hot air can escape, this means that the ice cube will stay cooler for longer.
To build the mini houses you will need:
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3 x tissue boxes. These are used for the houses themselves and can be any kind but the home brand would be best
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2-3 x cereal boxes. These are used for the roofs and the bigger you want your roof the more boxes you are going to need
 1 x ice cube. This will be used to test which house can stay cooler for longer
 Scissors. These will be used to cut the cardboard to make the roofs
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Sticky Tape. This will be used to hold the roof in place so that it doesn’t fall of when you are trying to do the experiment
 A Ruler. This will be used to measure the roofs
 A Stopwatch. To time the amount of time it takes for the ice cube to melt
INT Scientific Report Date Due 12-11-10

Liam Whelan Miss Joyce 8G
 Step1: Make sure you have all the equipment you need to do this experiment correctly.
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Step2: Cut off the side off the tissue boxes with the tissue dispenser. This will become the top of your houses.
 Step3: Measure the open side of your box from side to side and write the measurements down.
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Step4: Cut our a piece of cardboard from your cereal box using the scissors make sure that it is a little bit bigger than the measurements that you wrote down.
 Step5: Sticky tape the flat roof to one of the tissue boxes make sure it covers the open area.
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Step6: Cut out a piece of cardboard about the same length as the flat roof then cut out a piece exactly the same size.
 Step7: Sticky tape them together at one of the shortest ends and angle them the way you want them then measure them.
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Step8: With the measurements you just collected cut out a triangle piece then cut out an identical piece.
 Step9: Sticky tape all these pieces together then tape them to your roof.
 Step10: Cut of another piece the same size as the flat roof.
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Step11: Cut out another identical piece then fold one of the short ends just a little.
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Step12: Sticky tape the two pieces together and measures them.
 Step13: Use the measurements to cut out to identical pieces of cardboard to fill in the gaps.
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Step14: Sticky tape them all together and then tape it to the last house then you’re are ready to begin testing how cool your house is.
Flat Roof
Pointed Roof
Skillion Roof
(See Picture 2)
40mins
40mins
40mins
The ice was about to melt
The ice was half melted
The ice had barely melted
INT Scientific Report Date Due 12-11-10

Liam Whelan Miss Joyce 8G
The three houses we made where quite good at keeping the ice cool just like a house would.
Once the experiment was over we had discovered that the flat roof caused the ice to melt faster than the other two, the skillion roof kept the ice cooler for the longer period of time and the pointed roof melted slower than the flat roof but faster than the skillion roof.
The skillion roof melted slower than the other two because all the heat would rise up and out of the louvers at the top of the house while in the flat roved house the hot air was kept quite close to the ice cube melting it faster and in the pointed house the hot air was kept away from the ice cube for a while but over time the hot air got closer and closer to the ice cube eventually melting it.
When the experiment was over the results were exactly what was predicted in the hypothesis the Skillion roof melted the slowest, the pointed roof would melt a little bit faster and the flat roof would melt the fastest out of all of them.
Some great ways to keep your house cool would be to place louvers in the room in your house that is used the most this will allow for cross ventilation threw the room keeping it nice and cool, paint the house white or a bright colour this will reflect more heat than a darker colour and have your house on stumps this will allow air flow under the house keeping it cool and also will prevent flooding in rooms.
I would use all the information that has been gathered in the experiments to help build the energy efficient home because all of the experiments work just like the hypothesis predicted.
Some strengths to our cool house testing was that we discovered which roof would be best to use on our finial house design, a weakness would have to be the materials we made our mini models out of aren’t going to be the same as our finial model so the result may be different to the mini models.
There were a few problems with the testing of the houses and one of those problems would have to be that the sun was covered by clouds which meant that the suns heat wasn’t reaching
INT Scientific Report Date Due 12-11-10

Liam Whelan Miss Joyce 8G the house and this could have affected the results, it would have been tested again but due to lack of time it couldn’t.
I could have improved my design if I had tried harder to seal the top off completely and leave no gaps for air to escape and I also could have tried to add more things to them such as louvers and stilts and only change the roof type.
INT Scientific Report Date Due 12-11-10

Liam Whelan Miss Joyce 8G
Picture 1
Yellow areas require heating rather than cooling most of the year.
Grey areas require cooling most of the year.
Picture 2
House 2
House 1
House 3
INT Scientific Report Date Due 12-11-10