Data

To make the flash interface look real I talked with my tutor and he said we needed to put data in the interface to show how it would work. When we did the energy monitoring diaries in the holidays I didn't monitor things like the car or my communications. This meant when I was calculating the data for the interface (I wanted it to be like if the user opened it up and that was the data) I had gaps. I researched what I needed from some websites such as:

For the Car:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/green-living-blog/2011/jan/17/electric-car-emissions

I did this because in the future most people will have hybrid cars as fossil fuels become rarer and demand for cheaper sustainable travel increased.

For the Cellphone:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100730123650AAox0Y6

I thought this was the best data as it had been calculated by an engineer and I found it easy to read.

I combined these with the data I had gathered from the energy diary in the holidays. I did these in Watts as I wanted to know the highest power they could reach when in use. This interested me because quite often I left things plugged in and running e.g. the heater when I would leave a room. Living at home makes it easier to forget that you contribute to the energy consumption of a house because you arent the one paying the bills but having learnt what I did I had a different perspective. This is why I chose watts for my interface because I wanted the user to have the same if not similar revelation that I did.

For the total I had to convert a couple of things from kWh to Watts in order to calculate everything in the same unit of measurement. I used this conversion calculator to get an accurate calculation http://www.unitconversion.org/unit_converter/power.html. I used this again to convert the total watts into total kWh which is something the user could see and easily address and he/she can see that the power for the hour could be lowered.