Captone Project Survey

[Mr.Rocket]

Hi everyone,

For my senior year in high school, I am in a course of Project Lead The Way called Engineering Design and Development. The whole course is a capstone project. We are currently in the process of conducting market research for our project. I figured since the Kerbal community is so friendly that some people here would be willing to take my survey. 

Our project deals with solar panels. All will be explained in the survey. You can take this survey regardless of your age, and regardless of whether or not you have solar panels. We are looking forward to your responses. If you have any feedback, you can post it on this forum.

Also in case it needs to be more convincing, 4 out of 4 of the members of this group own KSP, and 3 out of 4 still play it regularly (hehehehe I convinced them all to play and they love it now). So help some fellow KSP players out and take this survey! 

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfuG7vCzW7kXb7NuW5GJHFEITvSg-YzDRHoNvP6_HkBBHK8kQ/viewform

Thanks for all of your time and support.

[Elthy]

I think there is an issue with the last question, there is by far not enough information to answer that. It depends on an extremly complicated calculation with many variables...

[Mr.Rocket]

4 hours ago, Elthy said:

I think there is an issue with the last question, there is by far not enough information to answer that. It depends on an extremly complicated calculation with many variables...

Hi Elthy,

The last question is simply asking how much you would be willing to pay for our potential product ( I believe this is what you're talking about. There are several different end paths). I know the prices of solar panels fluctuate depending on your roof (We could not find consistent data for the price of a solar panel) but essentially this question is asking how much above the regular price of a solar panel would you be willing to pay for a solution (per panel). Basically we want to know if we should go with a fully functional but expensive solution or if we should go with a low-tech, cheap solution.

But thanks for putting in the time to take our survey. My group appreciates it. 

[robopilot99]

On 1/8/2017 at 5:52 PM, Mr.Rocket said:

Hi Elthy,

The last question is simply asking how much you would be willing to pay for our potential product ( I believe this is what you're talking about. There are several different end paths). I know the prices of solar panels fluctuate depending on your roof (We could not find consistent data for the price of a solar panel) but essentially this question is asking how much above the regular price of a solar panel would you be willing to pay for a solution (per panel). Basically we want to know if we should go with a fully functional but expensive solution or if we should go with a low-tech, cheap solution.

But thanks for putting in the time to take our survey. My group appreciates it. 

Well it is more complicated. I think that Elthy as well as myself were questioning what counted as a "hot" temperature. 90F, 100F? That certainly affects whether such a product would be useful for our homes in the locations where we live. The way I look at it it's a simple question of cost-savings. Does the additional cost of your product offset the cost of the additional solar panels I would have to buy to offset the power loss due to heat?

[Mr.Rocket]

1 minute ago, robopilot99 said:

Well it is more complicated. I think that Elthy as well as myself were questioning what counted as a "hot" temperature. 90F, 100F? That certainly affects whether such a product would be useful for our homes in the locations where we live. The way I look at it it's a simple question of cost-savings. Does the additional cost of your product offset the cost of the additional solar panels I would have to buy to offset the power loss due to heat?

For solar panels,, every panel has a "temperature coefficient." This is the percent that a solar panel decreases in efficiency for every degree Fahrenheit over 77 degrees fahrenheit, a standard testing temperature (normally it's around 0.3%-0.5%). For solar panels, 77 degrees is the threshold, and all solar panels, according to our research, decrease in efficiency at temperatures above 77 (that isn't just the outside temp, thats the temperature of the solar panels which is often above air temperature. If you live in a region where the air is almost never above 77 degrees, then it would make sense that you would not want to pay much for this product.

That being said, this question is very loose, and I understand that. It's simply meant to be a baseline as to how complex our solution should be. I understand that it depends on how much more efficient our product makes the solar panels, but we have not completed any design portion of this product as we are in the market research phase still (we follow the design process). 

If you have any comments relative to this project that you cannot explain through our mostly multiple choice quiz, I would love to hear them. 

Thanks for checking it out!

[robopilot99]

Ok, cool. I wish you good luck with the design and experimental phases of your project. Let us know how things go.