During our attempt at creating a gutter-powered hydroelectric generator, we encountered several immense problems which were more difficult than building the wheel itself. For starters, since we obviously couldn't wait for it to rain to test our device out, we needed an accurate way of simulating the rainy conditions in both Vancouver and other places.

 

Of course, trying to simulate rain instead of using actual rain will inevitably cause many problems. One of which is how we dumped a day’s worth of rain that hits an average house (~400,000 ml) onto the water wheel in 30 minutes. In real life such a case is unlikely and therefore many of our numbers were probably slightly off due to that, since in an ideal world, no matter if all the water comes down at once or if it comes down one drop every hour, the amount of energy generated will be the same (Homepower.com). But in real life, if the water comes down in small amounts, which it likely will, much of the energy that the water carries will be lost to friction. So in real life, the power generated would actually be still much less than what we had recorded.  

 

 There are, obviously, some human factors that come into play as well. Firstly, our gutter generator is not bolted to the ground at all so it’s free to move. That is not good because common sense tells us that the position of the waterwheel in relation to the stream of water coming down will affect the amount of power generated. If it's placed more in line with the stream then the wheel will turn faster. If it's placed way off the stream then obviously the wheel will turn slower. The inconsistent placement of the waterwheel could have resulted in the changes in watts.

 

The shaft which broke after the sixth trial probably affected the results of our trial 5 & 6. There is clearly a lowering of the amount of watts generated in trial 5 & 6, and we think that that can be attributed to the connection to the shaft weakening. The weaker connection meant that sometimes the motor could slip and not turn when the waterwheel is turning.

 

Finally, some numbers we used in our calculations were less than ideal. For one, since we could not find the area of an average roof in Vancouver (to calculate how much rain hits the roof) we had to estimate that with the square meter of the average home in Canada divided by the floor number. And since we can’t just google how many stories are in a typical house, we had to sample houses by ourselves. We tried to make the sample size big by taking 50 random houses but 50 houses can hardly be representative of the 264,000 houses in all of Vancouver. We also frequently rounded numbers off when calculating the watt hours and averages, a major problem which we realized in hindsight because rounding numbers results in less and less accurate measurements.