RESET appropriates funds to six student projects

By Brooke Bullock and Ruby Gee     1/27/11 6:00pm

Members of the Rice Endowment for Sustainable Energy Technology recently picked their first round of grant winners. Six projects are receiving a combined $15,000 of funding from RESET to begin green projects around campus, with two groups receiving funds from Housing and Dining and Facilities, Engineering and Planning - another combined $25,000. According to its website, RESET works to combat rising energy costs and climate change by funding student initiatives. The groups awarded grants from RESET's will work toward a greener, more environmentally friendly campus.

"We are very impressed with what we have received. Some of the problems on campus are getting fixed by this," RESET Chair Rebecca Jaffe said.

RESET, a subcommittee of the Student Association, was started just over a year ago after a majority student vote approved a $9 blanket tax to fund the endowment. Faculty have played a large part in the formation of RESET.

---

---

"The faculty have been so great; they helped us get started and run things smoothly," Jaffe, a Wiess College senior, said.

However, RESET has been approved for just two years, unless the endowment is voted in again.

"We are establishing ourselves on campus," Jaffe said. "The main goal right now is to publicize."

Rice University Bike Share

The University Bike Share program will set up a checkout system at five colleges: Sid Richardson, Martel, Jones, McMurtry and Brown.

Baker College sophomore Christina Hughes worked on the original project from Environment Studies 302, which piloted a bike share program at Will Rice College while it was at McMurtry.

Hughes decided to continue the project, with other students joining her via herself or Director of Sustainability Richard Johnson, who taught the course.

A student bike representative will be hired at each of the five colleges and paid by FE&P to manage the five bikes, painted in college colors, supplied to each college.

The bike reps' main jobs will be checking out bikes, maintenance and contacting the Rice University Police Department if a bike is lost or stolen. Maintenance will be kept up by a $50 minimum that each college pays to participate in the program.

To get the program started, Hughes said they would need $1,588. RESET gave $588 in grant money to the program and Student Activities/President's Programming provided the rest as a grant.

Hughes said that bicycles collected from RUPD will be fixed up and repainted for use in the program.

"[The program] will help clean up bicycle waste," Hughes said. "Every year, there are lots of bikes left on the racks rusting."

Hughes said she hopes the program will encourage students to lower their use of motor vehicles to get around campus as well as encourage them to get out.

"Hopefully [the program] will get students off campus and get them to explore Houston more," Hughes said.

Self-sustaining Police Station

Formally titled the Self-Sustaining Police Station: "The Beat Goes On and On," creators of the project plan to install a solar hot water system for the Rice police station to be used by RUPD, the Navy ROTC and, to a lesser extent, the post office.

RESET appropriated $4,500 to help fund the solar water-heating system and its installation.

Graduate Studies Coordinator Lisa Tate, who works on the project, said they would add another hot water tank to the building, which would feed into the existing tank, both of which would be heated by solar panels on the roof of the police station.

One important point for Tate was that the system would also encourage other parts of Rice or other people to go green.

"It will show leadership and environmental stewardship," Tate said. "If Rice does [install solar water heaters], others may do it as well."

Tate said that the system would also have educational benefits, as the students could become involved in the system's maintenance.

She also said that Johnson would be willing to incorporate details of the system into several of his ENST classes.

Rolling in the Green

Another project submitted by Tate and Hanszen College junior Annie Blay is Rolling in the Green, an event that will encourage students to reduce their daily energy consumption.

Blay said the group plans to hold a campus-wide event in March to encourage students to turn off all appliances and raise or lower the temperature closer to ambient air temperature for 30 minutes a day in their dorm rooms.

Blay said the event will also reach the academic buildings, hopefully lowering their air conditioning for 20 minutes a day as well. RESET gave $600 to Rolling in the Green for various advertising media and T-shirts to encourage students to participate.

"The hardest thing is to get students to [participate]," Blay said.

The project proposed several easy ways students can reduce energy usage: Change the air conditioning up at least one degree on hot days or down at least one degree on cooler days; turn off and unplug unnecessary lights and appliances; close doors and windows when air systems are on; use cold water to wash clothes; and report energy waste in academic buildings, meaning rooms that are too cold or lights left on all night, to energywaste@rice.edu.

Tate and Blay both said that the ultimate goal was to get students doing the same thing, turning off and unplugging appliances and adjusting the AC, more often than just once.

"Renewable energy is great, but it's a long way off," Blay said. "We need to learn to use energy more efficiently now."

Toilet retrofitting

For her proposal, Martel College junior Doris Lee received $22,000 from H&D, in addition to $1,377 from RESET.

Lee said that the goal of her project was to conserve water by replacing these toilets with dual-flush toilets, which have light- and heavy-flush options.

Her inspiration for the proposal stemmed from a discussion in one of her classes.

"I learned about the toilets during my Urban and Environmental systems class," Lee said. "We were talking about water conservation and how water is actually a very precious resource."

According to Lee, prior to the 1990s, high-consumption toilets that utilized three gallons of water per flush were the norm on campus.

Lee said that after this decade, production of high-consumption toilets was banned, but a lot of high-consumption toilets remained on campus.

"Toilet retrofitting is actually surprisingly expensive, because you have to buy all of the pieces [and] pay for labor to install it," Lee said. "I specifically chose [toilets in] buildings that were used the heaviest, like Fondren [Library] and the [Rice Memorial Center] . so that it would be the most cost efficient."

Lee worked closely with Plumbing Supervisor David Mosquinski to develop the details of her proposal.

"I would regularly go to the plumbing shop and talk to him," Lee said. "He'd tell me where the toilets are at Rice, what the trends of usage are and what toilet models are good."

A/C and light renovation

This group's project aims at providing a more efficient air conditioning and light control system in Herzstein Hall.

There are two main parts to their project: adjusting the central air control system according to class schedule and renovating or replacing motion sensors.

"We tried to make the system smarter by implementing a more detailed schedule of the classroom usage," Brown College freshman and project coordinator Xiong said.

The group received $1,925 from RESET and $3,850 from H&D for their proposal.

According to the proposal, the cost of replacing the basement sensors should be around $700 each and renovating should cost approximately $250 each.

The group estimated total savings to be around $3,440 per year. Xiong said he came up with the idea when brainstorming ideas for RESET in a Brown classroom and realized how cold it was in the room.

The group did further research and found out many people complained about the temperatures in Herzstein as well.

"We want to build a computer software that will automatically transfer the data in the registration office to the air conditioning database, so that they don't need people to update the data every semester," Xiong said. "But currently we have not found a really good computer science guy."

The implementation of the project started Nov. 5 of last year, but Xiong said they started researching system inefficiency as early as last October. He estimated the end date to be around late March this year.

"We may move to other academic buildings next semester if we succeed in Herzstein," Xiong said.

Weatherization

According to Martel College sophomore Ben Chou, there are three parts to his RESET project: weather stripping the doors of the historic Will Rice building, insulating the walls of Will Rice and sealing the windows at Wiess College. RESET gave Chou $6,000, the largest amount out of all of the proposals.

Chou said his motivation for choosing weatherization came from his interest in conducting some form of sustainable development volunteer work in China.

Chou said that there, one of the biggest environmental problems is finding a way to develop and urbanize in an eco-friendly way.

"So I thought, why not do something here in Houston in order to get some experience that I could apply in China?" Chou said. "I did some research and found that here in Houston, we have a pretty special weatherization initiative that has been going on for quite a while. It seemed natural to bring that onto campus, since we have so many old buildings that need to be retrofitted."

According to Chou, the weatherization work will start Feb. 25, the Friday before spring break begins, and will hopefully be completed by the end of the week.

---