The City of Ames Energy Yardstick application will provide residents of Ames with personalized energy efficiency metrics based on past usage and other variables. User's will be able to compare their rating to 'similar' houses (in terms of size, number of occupants, etc), and also to the average for this area. Finally, they can access historical usage data for their account.
This tool will be hosted on a PHP server provisioned by the City, and the city plans to have our tool available for users directly from their main website.
We're developing this application with speed and ease-of-use in mind, with the intention of maximizing user satisfaciton and engagement. Using CJAX and jQuery UI, we can provide an MVC backend design in PHP with modern UI elements and animations on top.
Users want to know how efficiently they are using electricity, and how much money they could save. Our simplified rating system will take several indiviualized factors and actual energy usage to provide the user with a 1-10 rating of their energy efficiency. By providing beautiful graphics and informative comparisons to vehicle MPG, we can engage the user pas their rating and encourage them to learn how they can improve their rating and save money.
Using data from the City Assessor's office, we hope to provide the user with an accurate comparison of their rating to other similar homes across the city and homes in their neighborhood. With access to square footage, construction style, age, and other data, we can assess the user's rating in comparison to 'similar' homes. In addition, residences in a particular neighborhood are often about the same age and constructed using the same materials and processes. Using the neighborhood groups defined by the City, we hope to show the user how their usage compares to homes close to theirs.
Since we will already have access to the usage history of a user to calculate their rating, we plan on including a modern, informative view of their past usage inside this tool. If a user takes the time to access this tool, chances are they would be interested in their usage history and would want to know if a particular month was more or less efficient than their average. We can provided interesting graphics and useful information in this section using the data we already have access to.