Week 12 Tutorial: Assembly, and the failure you cannot design away

Week 12 tutorial — run the five whole-system checks on your recommended option, compare across the five homes, and leave with the proposal skeleton

27 May 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#

Eleven weeks have each produced a sized piece, and each one assumed it had first call on water, area and the daily energy allowance. Today you put them in one model and find out which gives way.

Story stage. Last teaching week. This tutorial is ungraded — there is no checkpoint 11. It is the assembly session for Assignment 2 and it is worth doing for the obvious reason.

Open these first#

• Your workbook, all of it, plus week 11’s options grid.
• The Assignment 2 brief — today’s output is its skeleton, item by item.
• The worked comparison for the cross-site exercise.
• Week 12’s lecture for the five checks in order.

If you are missing pieces#

Bring what you have and start from the options grid. If you have no grid, build one in the first twenty minutes from week 11’s tutorial — the proposal needs it more than it needs any single subsystem.

The words this week uses#

• The five checks — the whole-system tests from the lecture, run in order. Most people fail check 2 or 3 the first time.
• Peak month — the month your process energy is highest. Not the average month, and it must be named in the proposal.
• Bill of materials — every priced line of the recommended option, from the published schedule, plus the 10 % contingency.
• Uncertainty list — what you did not model and what you were unsure of, each with a range. This is marked, and a short list is not a strong one.

Do this#

1. Quiz 5 (20 minutes). On paper, on weeks 11 and 12 and the integration material.

2. Run the five checks (30 minutes), in order, on your recommended option. Most people fail check 2 or check 3 the first time, usually because a load or a line item from an early week never made it into the summary. Work back and find it rather than adjusting the summary.

3. Then the cross-site comparison (25 minutes). Form groups of five, one student per home, and take one design idea — an 8 m² aquaponic bed, say, or an extra 20 kL of storage — through all five sites. The worked comparison shows how this is set out. What you are looking for is not which site wins, but which constraint each site’s answer is really about.

4. Then the uncertainty list (15 minutes). Write down everything you did not model and everything you were unsure of, with a range for each.

The output#

A whole-system model that passes both hard constraints, plus the proposal skeleton — the ten numbered items of the Assignment 2 brief, each with either the content or a note saying where it will come from — and an uncertainty list.

Check your own before you leave#

1. Do all three mass balances close, with loss terms rather than residuals?
2. Is peak-month energy computed with the month named, uncertain loads at their upper estimate, and omitted loads listed with a range?
3. Is the bill priced entirely from the published schedule, with the 10 % contingency?
4. Is garden water satisfaction beside every water closure figure?
5. Can you name what fails first in the dry year, in which month, and what you would change?
6. Does your skeleton have a line for each of the brief’s ten items?

Where it goes next#

Assignment 2 is due in the assessment period. What is left is assembly, drawing and writing — not new subsystems. The planner allows four hours for it; if you find yourself needing forty, something from week 11 is missing rather than something new being required.

Back to week 12 overview