Week Three: Our Design Development of the Roof

Full Project Proposal Coming Soon on Upcoming Posting!

Where We Are with the Project:

Our group has handed in the project proposal and received back our initial suggestions for revision.  After the revisions are complete we will resubmit the form for approval of the project.  We have been working on the developmental of the roof design and collection barrow.  Once we have solidly enough designed these sections, we plan on working more on the design of irrigation part of the system.  This way at least the farm will be able to have a method to collect water in place.

Below is an early sketch for ideas of how we would collect and move water without a pump.  The general process of it is: 

1. The water flows from the slanted roof to the gutter into a single gutter pipe.
2. It then goes through a two wire filters and into a collection tank.
3. A valve at the bottom of the tank controls water flow for when water is needed from the tank.
4. From here the water would go to the irrigation system to be given to the plants.

This system is without a motorized pump.  Our goal is to have the system work only using gravity if we can.  This way the overall cost is lower and there is no worry about a source of electricity.

As you can see the roof is slanted in the drawing.  We found the ideal angle for water collection from the average monthly rainfall for Philadelphia, PA.  This was found on weather.com with the graph shown on the side.  We looked at this and saw that between all of the months it looked like the normal amount of rainfall during water collection times (warm months so system does not freeze) was around 3.7 inches per month.

http://www.weather.com/weather/wxclimatology/monthly/graph/USPA1276

Along with the data of the monthly rain, we did photo analysis of two photos of Greg in front of the shed.  By comparing Greg's known height to the shed, we were able to determine the dimensions of the shed.  We put all of this information into an excel spreadsheet in order to determine the best angle to set the shed's roof at so that it would collect the most amount of rain without having things get constantly stuck on it.  The length here is the projection of the roofing tiles we selected (which are 144 inches long) onto the roof.  This helps to determine the amount of volume of rain that the roof will collect.  There will be a bit of tiling that will be an overhang of about four inches which can be either over the back or the front of the shed.  We determined the best position would with the overhang on the high end, so that the gutter will be best attached well to the low end of the roof.

"Average Weather for Philadelphia, PA - Temperature and Precipitation." Weather.com. The
     Weather Channel, n.d. Web. 17 Apr. 2013.
     <http://www.weather.com/weather/wxclimatology/monthly/graph/USPA1276>.