Leafully is an energy saving application that helps you understand your energy usage in meaningful terms, find ways to save and helps you track against your goals.
How can I participate?
- Check out Leafully and all the Apps for Energy winners.
This is the first in a series highlighting the winners of the Apps for Energy competition.
Thanks to the Green Button program, millions of utility customers have access to their electricity usage data. The Apps for Energy competition is an Energy Department effort to provide these customers with apps that use this data, allowing everyone to get the most out of their Green Button data.
We’ll start our profiles of the winners with the grand prize winner, Leafully, a great app for learning about residential electricity use. In the words of the developers:
"Leafully is about helping people understand energy usage. A huge problem is that the units of energy are hard to comprehend. Leafully brings these terms down to something simple - a tree. Leafully also recognizes that energy usage is more than just electricity usage and thus tries to give the user a total tree footprint - the amount of trees needed to offset the pollution created by one's energy consumption."
Leafully is built by Tim and Nathan, two developers who are new to the energy sector. Tim says, “One of the goals I gathered from the contest was that the Energy Department wanted to find application developers to help champion the cause of empowering people with their energy data. Well, we're in!” We’re thrilled that Apps for Energy has inspired developers and designers to explore building Green Button apps.
Leafully has a number of great features for users, including a breakdown of where your energy comes from, comparisons between this month and last month, a calculator that shows the impact of various activities on energy usage, and a simple interface for selecting different activities that save energy. I’m a particular fan of their extensive explanation of how they make their calculations and where the data comes from. The design of the app is also excellent, making it easy to learn about the impact of your electricity usage. I’m excited to see what features they’ll add next!
If your utility offers Green Button data (find out), you can visualize it using Leafully. Even if your utility doesn’t have the Green Button, you can use their sample data to test out the app for yourself.
Congratulations to the Leafully team for building a great app!
