Project title: Keep The Heat!

Team: Keep the Heat!

Scoil Mhuire Community School   Clane   Ireland   16 Student’s age: 16-17 years old

Does DIY insulating film help retain heat?

After using the EO browser, we noticed how much emissions were being let out in our local community. We decided we wanted to reduce our schools impact on these emissions. We wanted to find ways to heat our school with less fuel and then went onto research insulation method. We decided another way to neutralise our schools emissions would be to plant trees. We found out that it would take 750 trees to neutralise our emissions, this was a tough challenge. We decided to plant 50 trees this year to reduce our emissions.
We realised the best way to reduce our emissions was to to improve the insulation of the school. We wanted to find ways to reduce heat loss in our school and in turn lessen the amount of oil our school used for heating. We decided to research cheap and DIY insulation methods, we landed on insulating film.
We found two similar sized classrooms, facing the same direction and with the same number of windows. We put up the film in one room, and placed thermometers in both rooms. Over the course of 10 non-consecutive (due to school) days, we checked the temperature in both rooms. The temperature of each room was taken before classes began to keep it a fair test (i.e incase the temperature went up due to a full class/open doors/ open windows).
The aim of our project was to find ways to reduce our schools emissions. We hope that using this in older/ colder classrooms will lead to the heat not being up so high or on for so long.

After checking the temperature of each room over the course of 10 (non-consecutive) days, we noticed that the room with the film had a temperature (on average) 19% higher than the room without.
Many students that had classes in the room with the film complained about how warm it is when the heating was on, while students in the other room did not.
This would mean we would not have to the heating on as much/ as high anymore if the classrooms had this easy to install film. This would in turn reduce our schools overall emissions.
Having this film up in older and less insulated classrooms will be very good as more heat will be retained and we will be wasting less oil for heating!

We plan to make a write-up the board of management in our school to get this film but up in older classrooms and the prefabs in our school.
We plan on showing the findings of our project on our school app. This would inform parents and show them why they should have this film up in their own homes!

Download project poster PDF

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