“We asked our researchers to leave no stone unturned in quantifying water usage patterns. And they did, excellently. We asked Beezwax to bring all that effort elegantly to the web — and they did, excellently.”
– Peter Gleick
Executive Director
household water, energy and greenhouse gas calculator for Pacific Institute
case study
the challenge
Using water more efficiently is easy, but it is sometimes difficult to know how to get started. Most of us don’t even know how much water we are using — nor how we could use less. The main difficulty is that our usage patterns are complex. How complex? Well, recall the last time you saw a spreadsheet so intricate that you had to scratch your head, take a sip of water, and sit down with it for a long, long time before understanding it. It’s more complex than that.
Yet the Pacific Institute, a world leader in educating the public and policymakers in the uses of water — and how to conserve it — successfully captured all the components of our water use into one super-smart comprehensive model of household water and energy use, calculated in a complex spreadsheet. Their model not only determines water usage, but also the carbon footprint from treating and delivering water to your home, heating and using it, and then treating and disposing of wastewater (all of which require energy).
The challenge they asked Beezwax to solve: make that model interactive for the public, on the web. Make it personalized, meaningful, and easy to use.
the beezwax solution
We started by analyzing the Pacific Institute’s entire model, to ensure we fully understood the intricate, multi-layered flow of calculations. In addition to the feat of replicating their model in web-based technologies, we had the added challenge of providing a user interface that would be intuitive and engaging to use.
We then represented these intricate calculations using a carefully chosen set of web programming languages that would ensure the greatest ease and speed of use for any number of simultaneous users.
The result is a user-friendly online survey that identifies your specific usage patterns, quantifies their carbon footprint, and outputs a customized action plan for how to save water, energy, and money, complete with colorful charts and suggestions of simple changes that can make a big difference.
the success story
Try out the calculator yourself and see how it can help us all more fully understand our relationship to this most vital natural resource.
Warning. Though the survey is easy to use, there are a lot of details to it. Before you begin, you may wish to take a sip of water…