Design and construction of a storage system for home hazardous chemicals.

Abstract

Most of the chemicals which we use at home for various activities like spraying, cleaning, fuelling, bush burning is hazardous in nature. Some of them are corrosive in that a leakage or a spill may affect the durability of other equipment (like utensils, cutlery) which consequently, may cause the family to be continually buying such property on top of misusing the chemicals themselves which also leads to wastage. Other chemicals (for example petrol, paraffin, and brake fluid among others) are so flammable that any mishandling can cause fire outbreak in a house hence leading to the destruction of property. The rest are poisonous in a sense that once mistaken to be drinks or food stuffs may result into accidental poisoning especially in children. In Uganda, some homes have cupboards, shelves, and drawers where such chemicals are stored but it’s so unfortunate that these cupboards are not customized for that purpose, the same cupboard used for storing books, food staffs, utensils, screens and even such chemicals hence a leakage of container in one shelf affects other items stored in another shelf. This project was therefore aimed at developing storage system for customized storage units which can accommodate such chemicals so that we reduce on the number of chemicals outside the storage unit, which come as a result of having very many family members who access the storage unit for various intensions, and end up leaving some of items like chemicals outside the storage unit thus the home insecure in in terms of chemical storage. This project focused on how we can safely store these chemicals through minimizing the access to such storage units, monitoring and capturing the inflow and out flow of chemicals and providing an alert in case one forgets to return the chemical he/ she picked. The work is arranged mainly in six chapters, Chapter one includes the introduction of a system. Chapter two discusses the literature related to the system, Chapter three illustrates the methodologies used in coming up with the working prototype of the system, Chapter four includes system design and analysis, Chapter five is contains the implementation and testing of the system and chapter six contain the summary of the work, discussions, conclusions and recommendations.