February 24th, 2010
We’ve just published another revision of the website, with some exciting new stuff.
Speed
We’ve done a performance run through the system, so everything will load faster than ever. We were able to simplify a few major components, and completely eliminate a few of our worst bottlenecks. Some pages doing large comparisons have sped up by several orders of magnitude.
More line chart options
When viewing a home report, you can now click on the legend for a line and toggle it on and off. This can make things a little clearer.
Clicking the legend for “VALWOOD Average” will hide that line from the graph:
Clicking it again will turn that line back on. This doesn’t make that much sense on a simple water graph, but this allows us to work with many more lines on the same graph.
Direct Group Comparisons
When you’re logged in and looking at one of your groups, we now show a graph directly comparing consumption for the homes in that group. This lets you go head-to-head with your friends:
Log in, make a group, and check it out!
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December 30th, 2009
Recently we’ve been working on more ways to display data, and this one so neat I wanted to share a screenshot:
Very fun stuff to work on, we hope to have this up and interactive on the live site in the next month or so. A very technical post about how these are drawn is available on the developer’s blog: simplistic heat-maps using Vecto.
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December 22nd, 2009
Here are a couple good articles from a premier home performance trade magazine and The LA Times.
Home Energy Magazine (March/April 2009) – How Private Should Utility Bills Be?
Perhaps it is time to consider a similar disclosure for energy consumption. Global climate change has taught us that my carbon footprint affects the well-being of my neighbors, so perhaps my neighbors have a right to know how much energy I consume. Of course there’s a sensationalist aspect to knowing the ten largest energy users in a community but other, more positive, forms of disclosure could prove more broadly useful than a “name and shame” strategy.
LA Times – California’s ‘psychology of influence’ to slash energy use
Psychologists call it the norm to conform. A well-known behavioral phenomenon that prompts people to mimic the actions of their peers, this subtle psychological trick is now used by utilities to cut their consumers’ electricity use.
Business Week – Energy Use: Neighbor vs. Neighbor
Would you be tempted to buy a Toyota Prius if your neighbor drove one? A growing body of evidence suggests people are more likely to behave in environmentally friendly ways when they see the people around them doing so. Alex Laskey and Daniel Yates, co-founders of software startup Opower, wanted to see if this theory could be applied to household energy use, where there was almost no visibility into consumption.
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