Today I am blogging about my mentor, Andy Pence. He is not only my mentor but he is also my dad. I asked him if he would be my mentor because he is an engineer and has experience and knowledge that will help me with my particular project. I enjoy working on projects with my dad so he was an obvious choice for my mentor for this assignment. This week I interviewed my dad so that my readers could get to know a little bit about him and his abilities that make him a good mentor for my project.

Riley: "What is your name?:
Mr. Pence: "My name is Andy Pence."
Riley: "What is your job title?"
Mr. Pence: "My job title is Senior Engineer."
Riley: "What is your workplace?"
Mr. Pence: "Trinity County Road Department."
Riley: "What are your job responsibilities that may be related to our project?"
Mr. Pence: "My job responsibilities that may be related to the project include designing and managing road projects that sometimes include,,um,,,landscaping or environmental mitigation where we plant plants and have to figure out how to water them over..ah...extended periods of time especially during the period where the plants are establishing themselves. A lot of times we do plant establishment for..ah... areas that have no water source or at least nothing really close by, so a lot of times we use water tanks, or we have used water tanks in the past, and drip irrigation-type devices to water plants using gravity."
Riley: "Where did you go to school?"
Mr. Pence: " I went to school at California Polytechnic State University, or Cal Poly, in San Luis Obispo."
Riley: "What was your major?"
Mr. Pence: "My major was agricultural engineering."
Riley: "What degree do you have?"
Mr. Pence: "Agricultural engineering...ah..a Bachelor of Science in agricultural engineering."
Riley: "What did you study in school that would pertain to my project?"
Mr. Pence: "I had to take several classes about irrigation and irrigation methods and design. I also took classes on fluid dynamics and hydrology. I am sure that there were many other things that I studied that will be related to what we are doing in this project."
Riley: "What do you think of this project? Do you think this project will help our community?"
Mr. Pence: "I think it is a good idea to save water. I think that a lot of the water from the swamp cooler goes to waste just by running off into the weeds, at least at our house, and I am sure at other people's locations that...ah... have swamp coolers similar to ours, the water goes to waste running into a location that probably gets too much water or by simply soaking into the ground. So I think this project will help the community if we are able to successfully come up with a method to spread that water out...the excess water, to places that need it."
Riley: "Ok, what do you see as steps we need to take for this project? Like pricing out parts and design."
Mr. Pence: "Oh yah, first you need to price out the major components and in order to make a pamphlet describing how to do it we need to build your water recycling device and we should have pictures of everything necessary...um... all of the necessary parts to build it, then we need to have or we need to design a kind of guide that shows how to assemble everything and have different ideas of what someone could do. Part of that would require pictures so we should build your device at our house and that way we get experience putting it together and we can then pass that experience on to other people by creating the pamphlet we are going to do. Let's see..supplies...um...we are going to need PVC pipe to run down from the roof, from the swamp cooler down the roof, down the side of the house, to the rain barrel we are going to capture and store the water in. We would then need some way to distribute that water. To do it by using gravity probably one of the best ways to do it would be using the...ah...small diameter drip hose or soaker hose and a drip system. So we have to figure how to plug that all into the bottom of the barrel; however the drip hose and the soaker hose will probably get plugged pretty easy, so if there is any debris in the water or in the system, or really even in the air that can get into the barrel, then we have to somehow filter that out before it gets into the drip system. That means we need to install a filter that will keep the water or...ah...the larger contaminants from plugging up the drip system. I think once we figure that all out we will just take some pictures and be able to make a pamphlet using some kind of software...we will have to figure out that software too...Microsoft Publisher would be ideal but there are other alternative software packages that we could use to do that as well."

     I think my dad has some very good ideas about how to go about designing and building my water recycling device. He has much experience with the building of irrigation systems that will be very helpful in the building of my project. As a senior engineer he has experience overseeing projects like mine and keeping the work on track. I think that having my dad as my mentor on this project will be a great experience and I will enjoy designing and building my water recycling device with him.