Our most recent project at Aquacue has been developing and co-sponsoring a water-saving competition at University of California Merced. This opportunity came about as a result of a 40+ Barnacle installation throughout the central valley campus. A subset group of nine residence halls (565 students) provided the perfect arena to stage the first biannual UC Merced Water Battle 2011 in a one-month, inter-hall, water-saving competition.
Aquacue partnered with the Office of the Chancellor and student groups: Green Campus/Alliance for Saving Energy and Engineers for a Sustainable World. We provided the back-end tools—web & mobile-accessible dashboards tracking real-time rankings and water metrics—while the student leaders were the eyes, ears, mouthpieces and feet-on-the-ground at UC Merced. And they’ve been awesome, tireless advocates.
Our goal for the competition is to achieve a 10% overall reduction in water consumption for all nine residence halls. Our strategy: use the Aquacue water-monitoring technology to quantify the real-time impact of the students’ water conservation efforts. We’re also using social encouragement through a Water Battle Facebook page, leveraging resident hall affiliations (us vs. them) to juice the competitive mindset, and employing both self-interest (pizza party) and altruism (a $1000 donation to a nonprofit on behalf of the winning dorm) as prize incentives. It’s working beautifully, so far. We’re on day 16.
The latest news is: we’ve just published the first 16 days of consumption data into new field reports. These charts track rank change over time, track water consumption and water leaks by hall, and the Aquascore chart posted here.
This chart tracks a hall’s gallons/person/day value against their baseline G/P/D over time and it’s designed to show improvement in a residence hall’s water efficiency, regardless of the hall’s ranking.
The good news is: a 13% reduction overall in water consumption!
The interesting news is: when we added leak alerts to the Battle Site, the leaks got fixed. Students have since been saving more water by their own actions (32,000 gallons) than was lost due to leaks (21,000 gallons.) By eliminating the leaks’ countereffect, the competition’s now all about true grit.
Poke around on the UC Merced Water Battle 2011 site.
Here’s the article from the UC Merced Website.
Don’t forget to like the Water Battle’s Facebook’s page!
It takes a quite a bit of ingenuity to bring simple, easy and innovative solutions to big, real-world problems. Towards that end Dr. Reza Kassayan has recently joined Aquacue’s advisory board as an engineering consultant and technical advisor.
