MAY 6TH, 2013

U N I T

P R O J E C T

BY: OLIVIA LEFEUVRE

ELECTRIC BOUND
Contributing to the demise of our planet?
Pollution from global warming causes destruction to our planet and is increasing yearly. Electricity usage contributes to the rise in the temperature of the Earths atmosphere. It is killing our planet. So what can you do? usage with a view to decreasing it. I electricity in an effort to save planet choose to track my familys electricity Earth. We began turning off the lights usage. and air conditioning when we were not in the rooms. Please see our To track this usage, I asked my dad monthly electricity usage, which is for copies of our monthly electricity exhibited the table below. bills, which stated the number of KwH my family of 4 was using per Month KwH Our math teacher, Ms. Lemos, has month. We tracked our electricity made us very aware of this fact and usage over a 9-month period. I am August 9549 has given our 8th grade class at ISKL a sorry to say that our bills were project designed to save the earth. amongst the highest in the class! We were given the option of keeping Shocked by this fact, my family and I September 5871 track of either water or electricity were determined to try to use less
October 4008 5281 3021 4337 5117 5527 5243

Equation: y = -295x + 6461

November December January February March April

Decrease in Electricity Usage at Lefeuvres House!

Using the data from the table above, I plotted points point in the corresponding graph. These points went both up and down, but generally declined over the entire 9 months. As you can see in the graph above, there are many outliers, but the general trend is downward. Over the rst 3 months, our electricity usage decreased dramatically. Then it increased a bit, decreased signicantly and has been increasing marginally over the last 4 months. The largest decrease in usage can be seen at the very beginning when usage dropped 3678 KwH from August to September 2012. Near the end, my results kind of stayed the same showing that my family and I have formed a new pattern of lower electricity usage, which is more benecial to the planet. After 5-months of continuing this new habit, our electricity usage decreased by over 6000 KwH! I believe this happened because all my family members have been trying our best to turn the air conditioner off or lower the temperature and we really got the hang of it after 4 months. Unfortunately we werent able to keep the KwH this low usage did not increase dramatically from this point. To bring our results to where they are now my family and I have been putting post it notes around the house reminding us to turn of the lights or air conditioner when we are not using it. The post it notes have also been telling us to put the air conditioner at a higher temperature. We will keep doing this for as long as we can try our hardest to bring the number of KwH a month to 300 KwH. It wont be easy but it is a goal my family and I can strive for.

My sister and I dinning at candle light.

To calculate the slope (rise/run): 1.I used my second month September that has 5871 KwH (2, 5871) and then my fourth month November that has 5281 KwH (4, 5281) which are both on the line. 2.To get the rise I did 5281-5871, which gives me a negative vertical change of -590. 3.To calculate the run, I subtracted 2 months from 4 months (4-2), which gave me a positive horizontal change of positive 2. 4.To get the slope I then divided the rise of -590 by 2. This gave me -295 as my slope. As the number of KwH decreases, the line slants down from left to right and thus gives me a negative slope. To calculate the vertical intercept: I used the month of September point (2, 5871). I plugged these numbers into the equation y = mx + b. This gave me: 5871 = -295(2) + b 5871 = -590 + b +590 +590 6461 = b Which gives me a vertical intercept of (0, 6461). Prediction: So, to calculate the number of months it would take my household to lower electricity usage to 300 KwH, I plugged 300 in for y: 300 = -295x + 6461 - 6461 -6461 -5900/-295 = -295x/-295 20.88 = x So, at the same pace of decrease in usage, it will take my family and I approximately 21 months to reach 300 KwH.