Dear Tools for Tenants,

I am writing to thank you for your efforts to improve transparency in the rental marketplace. As a renter for the past 9 years, I have often been frustrated by the lack of effective energy efficiency policies and programs targeted at the rental marketplace.

For example, homeowners are afforded tax-breaks or subsidized discounts related to energy improvements; these subsidies are not generally made available to investors of rental properties. While energy improvements can increase the resale value of a property, investors do not enjoy the direct benefit (cash flow) of reduced utility costs. Given these circumstances, it is perfectly understandable why rental-investors, in general, are not motivated to improve the energy efficiency of their properties. This condition seems to apply across the board, affecting residential and commercial tenants throughout Gainesville.

Your website improves this situation by allowing tenants to make better decisions concerning the expected costs associated with a property offered for lease. I believe this information will help to amplify and explain differences in rent prices (actually paid) on a going-forward basis. In the past, I had to call GRU by telephone to get utility consumption information for any particular place that I was considering renting. That process was time-consuming and did not afford me the ‘luxury” of sampling multiple properties or time periods; for most people, operating cost simply wasn’t a part of their decision-making process. However, as your website has drastically reduced the cost of getting this information, it is now much more feasible to both consider operating cost and to justify, either up or down, an adjustment to the prices of comparable properties.

When renters start using this information in earnest, I believe we’ll be one step closer to a better, cleaner, more efficient use of natural resources. As a rental-consumer, this information directly benefit me by allowing me to formulate an offer based on facts, and thereby, to vote with my dollars. Those investors who continue to neglect energy efficiency will suffer decreased/stagnant rents, thus putting the burden of investment back together with the potential gains to be accrued from pricing power.

What you’re doing is important to this community, fiscally and environmentally. I am so thankful for your efforts–and even more so for the results!

Sincerely,

Andrew Adams
Gainesville, Florida

The author’s blog post compliments us on our easy-to-use interface for which we thank our community focus group members. He seems to take issue with the fact that a city council member’s house is not shown. All the data is pre-screened (before it arrives at our office) for public office holders, police officers and other likely targets of harassment.

On to the privacy concerns expressed in his post and in the reader comments. The Florida Sunshine Law is what allows us access to this data. GRU, being a municipal utility, exposes its data in an effort toward transparency and efficiency, in compliance with this statute. We feel that this data allows consumers to make informed decisions about how much electricity they are using, by allowing them to easily compare their own consumption with others they do or do not know. The data and graphs are intended to enlighten us about our own consumption patterns and those of our society around us.

Because energy consumption is a single indicator of such a complex, dynamic system, it is very difficult to measure your own progress. E.g. “Did I use more because it was hotter or because I got that new hot water heater?” or “My bill was lower this July than last; was it something I did, or did everyone use less electricity?” The only real way to find answers is in relation to how much everybody used. Or, even better, how much homes similar to mine used in the same situation.

That’s our goal: allow consumers to make decisions about how much we are using. No shame or ridicule involved. Besides your neighbor with the red house on the map might have a home business or a medical concern that requires the expense.

We now have consumption records covering through May 2011, and we can see how the spring treated us.  Comparing my home’s 2011 and 2010 usage, I’m off to a good start:

Dark green is 2011, a nice improvement

The data updates are also in place for ToolsForTenants.com, and now renters can see how Gainesville-area apartments have performed recently before re-signing their lease.

There are no new features with this release, just more data.  We have several significant revisions in the works, but wanted to get the data up as soon as possible.

We’d like to thank Gainesville Regional Utilities, the City of Gainesville, and the University of Florida Program for Resource Efficient Communities, for all their effort in making this update possible.

Please note that because the SBIR/STTR funding is limited, some very good grant applications had to be declined.

All in all, 47% of SBIR II applications were approved.  I’m extremely proud of the hard work everyone put into the SBIR I work and the SBIR II proposal, and this outcome does not change that.  I firmly believe we fall into the category of “very good grant applications.”  Here is some of the great feedback we got from the technical reviewers:

This portal could provide a much needed platform for economic activity by engaging the consumer with the service providers.

If the proposed portal emerges successfully, which will need to be  monitored and measured in terms of continued usage statistics, long term  sustainability will become a naturally aligned interest of the  community and the private sector.

I believe there is a real need and ready energy consumers.

I am pleased to see the strong commitment between the University  of Florida and Acceleration [ed: Acceleration is EnergyIT's parent company].  That combination of academia and industry  has to happen to make efforts such as this a success. The connection to  other interested parties represented in the proposal is critical to provide a long-term survivability and support vector for this work.

I believe that utility companies, trade organizations, realtor  groups, and providers of home improvement services and products will  fund such efforts.

EnergyIT projects will continue regardless of SBIR II funding.  We have many great opportunities with other grants, local projects, and national partners.

• Internet Explorer style issues – found some problems between IE9, IE8, and IE7; added some conditional style to gracefully degrade the appearance
• Mislabeled graph dates – the graph titles now reflect the date range actually displayed, not the date range we asked the database for
• Data refresh – recalculated apartment averages based on the most recent data dump

EnergyIT Launches Web Tools to Help Tenants

Gainesville, FL – April 12, 2011 – EnergyIT, in cooperation with Gainesville Regional Utilities (GRU), has officially launched http://ToolsForTenants.com, a website to help renters factor energy usage into their purchasing decisions.

The site has been in public beta for several months, and displays energy use details about 159 apartment complexes in the Gainesville area.

http://ToolsForTenants.com is featured in a new section on GRU’s website, Resources for Renters.

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EnergyIT is a child company of Accelerated Data Works (dba Acceleration), a privately owned technology service provider based in Gainesville, FL.  EnergyIT produces software to make the most out of energy consumption data, capturing its meaning and presenting its significance. The software utilizes various comparative measurement and verification protocols developed by the University of Florida’s Program for Resource Efficient Communities (UF/PREC)

Contact:
Ryan Davis
www.energyIT.com

Read the GRU press release for more information.

There are two notable features in this release:

New data!  We’ve got another dump from our friends at Gainesville Regional Utilities (who were recently named Best of U.S. Public Power Utilities), and just finished getting it into the system this morning.

There is also a new checkbox on the map screen for “show energy intensity per 1000 square feet”, which changes how the map pins are colored:

By default, we color pins based on raw consumption; so a big house that consumes 1000kwh will be redder than a small house consuming 900kwh.  Energy intensity is measured per thousand square feet, and smooths out the difference between home sizes.  This really makes a difference when looking at neighborhoods with drastically different home sizes, and gives some clues about how behavior and technology can affect consumption.  Here’s a neighborhood with a lot of bigger homes at the south end.  Here’s the raw consumption:

And here’s the energy-intensity consumption:

When we see consumption per square foot, some of those big homes are doing better then the smaller houses at the top.  This only goes so far; notice the most consumptive home is the same in both cases.