HEEP Design Revisions

Realizing that our last designs were a bit too complicated for the average user, we decided to play them down a bit and make a few of them simpler to use and more visually appearing. I'm learning that high level design is much more challenging then the actual implementation. As such, I think this is a really good, but difficult exercise. I am starting to see the benefits after much frustration.

Let me walk you through a few of our mock-ups:

This is the EnergyStar Refrigerator Calculator. You select an approximate date and size and it will calculate your savings based on predefined average energy usage by the appliances. The energy cost, which will fluctuate the most will be either scraped from an external source, or updated manually on a Google Spreadsheet.

This is the Oil Consumption Timeline. Looking at it will hopefully tell you what is happening. It calculates the change from last year in the amount of oil consumed (number of barrels).

This is the Energy Generation by Source Chart. It breaks down the recent and future use of certain methods of power generation.

We also have the idea of working with NegaWatts (from Wiki):

Negawatt power is the idea of creating incentives to reduce demand for electricity to ease the load at peak times or alleviate the need to build more generation plants. In theory, these negawatts can be aggregated and an arbitrage market could be created to trade these.
The term was coined by Amory Lovins, who saw a typo — "negawatt" instead of "megawatt" — in a Colorado Public Utilities Commission report. He adopted the term to describe electricity that wasn't created due to energy efficiency.[1]

The Negawatts is almost complete, but the visualization needs a bit more work. Basically it comes down to totaling up the Negawatts for the appliances.

As we get closer to picking a few top selections of these visualizations and calculators, we will start to really refine them and take feedback from different people to see what needs more work.