Week 1 Tutorial: Building your client evidence workbook

The first tutorial — choose one of the five client homes, build the four-sheet workbook every later week writes into, and fill one row of it properly

25 February 2027

Time

90 minutes in the room, plus about 30 to tidy the output

Graded

No. Ungraded practice — but everything after it assumes you did it

Due

Nothing to submit

What this tutorial is for#

You are a graduate engineer at Common Ground, and today you pick up a file. By the end of the session you have a client, a place to keep everything you learn about them, and one row in it done properly.

Story stage. Week 1 of the scoping half. Nothing has been measured. Every number you write today is either a published figure, a fact the client told you, or something you have marked as not yet known — and the last category is the one that eventually becomes Assignment 1.

This week is ungraded practice. Nothing is submitted. But weeks 2 to 11 all write into the workbook you build here, so a student who skips it starts week 2 with nowhere to put the answer.

What the client evidence workbook is#

It is your own spreadsheet. Excel, Google Sheets, LibreOffice, Numbers — whichever you already use. It is not a feature of this website, there is nothing to log into, and nobody collects it. This site publishes; you compute.

It has four sheets, and keeping them separate matters more than anything else you will do today:

A fifth sheet arrives in week 7 and must not be mixed into sheet 2. That is the simulated monitoring year — a month-by-month record of what a year of measurement at your home produced. Climate normals say what an average February does; the monitoring year says what one particular February did. Averaging them together destroys both.

Open these first#

• The five client homes — five intake dossiers. You are choosing one of these and keeping it for the whole course.
• The CSV templates below. Download all four; they carry the column names and one worked example row each.
• The measurement primer — you do not need it today, but sheet 3’s columns come from it.

Download the templates#

Open each in your spreadsheet program and paste it into its own sheet of one file. Each template’s first line is a comment describing the sheet; keep it or delete it, it does not matter. The next row contains the column headings. Below those are Canberra example values and blank rows. Keep the headings, remove the example marker where present, and replace the example values with your own home’s values.

If you would rather type the sheets out than download them, the column names are in the tables below and that is all the templates contain.

Do this#

1. Choose your home (10 minutes). Open the clients page and read the five intake notes. Five presets, no cap on how many students take each. Different constraints make different homes easier or harder in context; the site-specific reference bands are a diagnostic comparison, not proof of equal grading outcomes. Write your choice and one sentence of reason on sheet 1.

2. Fill sheet 1 from the dossier (25 minutes). Your home’s page carries everything on this sheet. Eight rows minimum. Every row needs a status and a source:

• known — the dossier states it. Source: the clients page.
• estimate — the dossier states it and says it is an estimate, like the slope read off a contour map. Copy that word across; do not promote it.
• unknown — the dossier lists it under “what nobody yet knows”. Enter the row with an empty value. These rows are the seed of Assignment 1.

Here is the whole of the example row set, for the Canberra home, from its dossier:

Note the third and fourth rows. Roof plan area is 295.7 m² and the roof connected to storage is 41.6 m². They are different quantities and a design that confuses them is wrong by a factor of seven. Keep them as separate rows for the rest of the course.

3. Fill sheet 2 — twelve rows of climate normals (30 minutes). Your home’s long-term statistics are published as a CSV, one per home. They are sourced from the Bureau of Meteorology for your home’s station, and the file’s first line says so.

These files sit in the same folder the week 7 findings will come from. They are not part of the measured year. The sourced file’s first line begins # SOURCED:; every synthetic file’s begins # SYNTHETIC. Learn to look at line one before you use a file — it is the habit this course cares about most.

The Canberra January row, filled:

Check the units as you go. rain_mm is a monthly total in millimetres; eto_mm is monthly reference evapotranspiration, also millimetres — the depth of water a reference grass surface would lose in that month. tmax_c is the mean daily maximum, not the hottest day ever recorded. effective_rain_mm is always smaller than rain_mm: it is the part that reaches the roots, after runoff and deep drainage. Week 2’s lecture derives it. If your sheet ever shows effective rain equal to or greater than total rain, you have pasted a column into the wrong place.

4. Start sheet 4 with one assumption (10 minutes). Every course-supplied number that is not a measurement goes here. Start with the demand convention, which is the one you will use every week:

5. Swap and find the unsourced row (15 minutes). Trade workbooks with somebody on a different home. Find one row on theirs with no source, or with a status that flatters it. There is always one. That is the entire exercise and it is the reason the swap is in the session rather than the homework.

The output#

A four-sheet client evidence workbook, with one home chosen, sheet 1 filled from the dossier, twelve sourced rows on sheet 2, and at least one assumption logged on sheet 4.

Check your own before you leave#

Run these on your own file, in order:

1. Does every row on sheet 1 have a status and a source?
2. Is there at least one row with status unknown and an empty value?
3. Does sheet 2 have exactly twelve rows and a station number?
4. On sheet 2, is effective_rain_mm less than rain_mm in every one of the twelve rows?
5. Do roof plan area and connected roof area appear as two different rows with two different numbers?
6. Could someone else open your file and say where any single number came from?

Where it goes next#

Week 2 computes an irrigation demand curve from sheet 2 and writes the result beside it. Every tutorial from here to week 11 opens the same file.

You keep the workbook; nobody collects it. Bring it to every session.

Back to week 1 overview