Year-long Measurement Programme

Assignment 1 — a twelve-month plan for finding out what nobody yet knows about your client's home, with every instrument tied to the decision it informs and the whole thing costed against the investigation allowance

Due: 23 April 2027 · Weight: 20%

The brief#

Your client has asked what their home could do. Before anyone spends $30,000 finding out, design the twelve months of measurement that would tell you — what to measure, where, how, how often, how well, and what decision each reading is for.

This is a plan, not a design. You are not asked to choose a system, size a tank or size a garden. You are asked the question that comes before all of those: what would I have to know, and what would it cost to find out?

The judgement being tested is whether every instrument on your list earns its place. A measurement that no decision depends on is money spent to fill a spreadsheet. A decision with no measurement behind it is a guess wearing a number. Both are visible immediately in this submission.

Read the measurement primer first. It covers the instrument classes this course expects you to know about — rain and tank, soil and shade, food and waste logging, and how to state an uncertainty — and it is short.

The story, plainly#

The Household Resilience Loan Programme and Common Ground Engineering are fiction, invented so the engineering has a client, a budget and a deadline. Nobody applies for a real loan. Nobody waits a real year. You submit this plan at the end of week 7; the story then jumps twelve months, and in week 7’s lecture the specialist team hands back what a measurement year at your home found. Those findings are the same for every student who took your home, whatever your plan said — so a weak plan here does not damage Assignment 2, and a strong one does not privilege it.

Everything you calculate before that handover is a scoping estimate on published figures and the course’s practice data. It is not an observation of this house, and your submission should never call it one.

What you submit#

A single document, plus your workbook.

1. The client and the decision inventory. Your home, its fixed constraints, and the decisions the eventual retrofit will turn on — written as decisions (“connect the house roof or not”, “keep fish or not”), each with the alternatives actually available.
2. A measurement register, one row per measurement, with: what is measured, which decision it informs, sensor or manual method, where on the site, units, frequency, and stated accuracy or resolution. A row missing any of those is an incomplete row.
3. A seasonal coverage statement. Which months matter for which measurement and why. A soil-moisture record that misses your site’s driest month has not measured the thing that decides the design.
4. Calibration and drift. For each instrument class: what you would check it against, how often, and what you would do when it disagrees.
5. A missing-data plan. What you do when a logger fails. Which readings are recoverable by interpolation and which are not, and how a gap is marked so that next year’s reader knows it was a gap.
6. Safety and access. Roof and tank access, electrical work, anything on a ladder, anything involving effluent or a confined space. Say what is done by a licensed trade and what is not done at all.
7. The costed programme, within the separate $1,500 investigation allowance. Equipment and services are charged against it; your own hours are scheduled, not charged. Show the total, show the headroom, and say what you dropped and why.
8. An assumption and source log. Every figure you used to plan with, where it came from, and whether it is sourced, a course assumption or your own estimate.

Indicative length: 2,000 to 3,000 words excluding tables and the workbook.

What this assignment does not ask for#

State these as out of scope rather than attempting them:

• No sized food system. No grow-bed area, no stocking density, no substrate tonnage as a design commitment. If you use those calculations to argue that a measurement is worth taking, label them scoping estimates.
• No costed retrofit. The $30,000 implementation allowance is Assignment 2’s constraint, not this one’s.
• No pipe sizes, no wiring, no structural detail. Not in either assignment.
• No claim that anything has been measured. Nothing has. That is the point.

What loses marks#

• An instrument list with no decisions attached, or decisions with no instruments.
• A frequency with no reason — “daily” because daily sounds thorough.
• Accuracy stated as “accurate” or omitted.
• A programme that fits the allowance because the expensive items were quietly left out rather than named and rejected.
• Describing a scoping estimate as a finding.
• Twelve months of measurement that all happen in one season.

Dates#

Due 5 pm, Friday 23 April 2027, the Friday of week 7. Week 6’s tutorial is given over to assembling and reviewing this plan, and week 7’s tutorial is the last working session before it is due.

Feedback returns in week 9. The specialist findings you use for Assignment 2 do not depend on it.