Household Resilience Investment Proposal

Assignment 2 — the specialist findings turned into a recommendation. The existing baseline against three feasible retrofit options, one of them argued for, with the rejected ones explained

Due: 18 June 2027 · Weight: 40%

The brief#

A year of measurement at your client’s home is finished and the findings are in front of you. Compare the home as it stands with three feasible retrofit options, recommend one, and make the case for it in terms the household can act on.

This is the document that goes to the programme. Not a brochure and not a construction drawing: a comparison with its arithmetic attached, a recommendation with its uncertainty declared, and an honest account of what you chose not to do.

The judgement being tested is whether the option you recommend is the one your own numbers support. Three options that differ only in scale are not three options. A recommendation that ignores the household’s stated priorities is not a recommendation.

Where the numbers come from#

Your home’s specialist findings — the measured year, the soil zones, the water quality, the flow events, the food-waste audit — are published on your client’s findings page and downloadable as CSV. They are the same for every student who took that home, whatever Assignment 1 said, so nothing here depends on how that went.

The findings are synthetic: generated to be consistent with the home, labelled that way in every file’s first line and on every page. They stand in for a measured year. They are not one, and a single year — even a real one — does not establish drought reliability, which is why the separate synthetic dry year exists.

What you submit#

1. The baseline. The home as it stands, from the findings: what it uses, what it imports, what it wastes, what it already has. Every later comparison is against this.
2. Three feasible retrofit options, each a coherent package rather than a shopping list, and each one actually buildable on your site. One of them should be noticeably cheaper than the others; that is usually the interesting one.
3. A flow diagram for the recommended option: water, food and waste streams, every arrow labelled with a direction and a quantity, imports drawn crossing the boundary rather than omitted.
4. A conceptual site layout on your home’s plan: where the storage, the treatment, the growing area and the sanitation system go, with separation distances and access shown. Conceptual, to scale, not a construction drawing.
5. The important capacities and flows for each option — storage volume, connected catchment, treated volume, irrigated area, peak flow and static lift, whichever your options actually turn on. Show the calculation for the ones that decide between options.
6. Cost, from the published price schedule, including the 10 % contingency. Hard constraint: $30,000 of new spend. Existing site inventory is free.
7. Energy, as a peak-month daily average with the month named, counted loads with power and duty cycle, uncertain loads at their upper estimate, and omitted loads named with a range. Hard constraint: 5 kWh/day.
8. Reliability and maintenance. What fails, how often, what it takes to keep running, and who does it. Run the recommended option against the dry-year dataset and say what gives way first and in which month.
9. Uncertainty. What you did not model, what you were unsure of, and a range for each. This is marked, and a short list is not a strong one.
10. The rejected options, with reasons. Including any subsystem you decided against entirely.

Indicative length: 4,000 to 6,000 words excluding tables, drawings and spreadsheets.

You may reject subsystems#

Nothing in this course requires your final design to include mushrooms, insects, aquaponics, preservation or a composting toilet. Each was taught so you could size it and judge it. Declining one with a reason is a result, and a common one: the arithmetic in weeks 3 to 5 exists precisely so that “we sized it and it does not earn its place on this site” is an answer you can defend.

What is not acceptable is omitting a subsystem silently, or rejecting it with a preference rather than a number.

What this proposal is not#

• Not a loan approval. The programme is fiction and there is no credit assessment anywhere in this course — no interest rates, no income tests, no financial advice.
• Not a construction-certified design. No pipe diameters, no wiring diagrams, no structural detail, no certification. You specify performance and how a builder would demonstrate it has been met; licensed trades do the rest later.
• Not a demonstration of every technology taught. See above.

Hard constraints#

These are checked before the criteria are applied.

A design that fits the budget by $1,000 is not comfortably compliant. The reference designs themselves clear it by $1,125 at Darwin, which is inside the noise of a screening model priced from retail listings, and the course says so rather than pretending otherwise.

How performance bands are used#

Your reported indicators are placed against your own site’s reference bands. Bands are evidence inside the criteria, never an automatic grade, and water closure is never reported without garden water satisfaction beside it — a high closure with a dry garden reads exactly as what it is.

Bands do not compare you to other students, and they do not guarantee equal outcomes across sites; the stability testing behind them is published with its limits.

Dates#

Due 5 pm, Friday 18 June 2027, in the assessment period. Teaching ends Friday 28 May; the three weeks between are for assembly, drawing and writing — the suggested effort planner allows four hours for them, not a fortnight’s work.

Results and feedback return by the end of the assessment period.