EnergyMirror is a web application designed to help property managers, building owners and other commercial real estate stakeholders understand and manage their buildings' energy consumption, utility billing, and regulatory compliance. The application is a work in progress and is far from completed.
Upon signing up, a user gets set up in three easy steps:
- User grants EnergyMirror access to their utility accounts (UtilityAPI integration)
- User creates their building(s) in EnergyMirror
- User sets up the links between their buildings and the correct energy meters
Once the user completes these initial steps, EnergyMirror collects historical bill information and subscribes to any future bills. The user can see a dashboard of any building's energy consumption and cost.
There are many more features that would turn this side project into a real business. I have highlighted some of them below - I plan on chipping away at these features in the next few weeks.
Try out EnergyMirror demo by logging in as:
- Email: [email protected]
- Password: demouser1!
Most of the code I have written in my career has been closed source. This left me in a bit a of pickle when I started looking for my next position. Many companies, and especially those with small teams or looking for remote work, asked for samples of code that I could share. I didn't have much. I created a packet with screenshots of the products I worked on with detailed descriptions of the products and technology stacks I had worked with - however, it didn't capture what I could bring to the table.
I needed to build a real web application and put it out in the open, so here it is!
The views in the application are server-rendered using ERB templates. There are a couple of places where I used client-side technologies:
- The sidebar uses Stimulus to expand and collapse itself
- The chart in the building dashboard uses ReactJS and CanvasJS to render the chart
The philosophy is to keep as much of the front end as possible server-rendered and use sprinkles of JavaScript where client-side behavior is required. In the future each table will be fully sortable and filterable using React to keep operations in the client side.
To gather utility account, meter, and bill information, EnergyMirror uses a service called UtilityAPI to connect with a user's utility accounts.
The interface for communicating with UtilityAPI is located at UtilityApi::Client and the importing proof-of-concept logic is located in the interactors directory
Below is a list of gems used. One of the earliest goals when building this application was to set up a standard skeleton Rails 6 app from which to start any subsequent projects. The list below represents my favored toolkit for a Rails app:
- Devise
- Bootstrap
- Stimulus
- React
- RSpec
- FactoryBot
- Shoulda Helpers
- Faker
- Pry
- Sidekiq
- Redis
- Foreman
- Letter Opener
- Interactors
Many jurisdictions across the country (including the state of California and the city of New York) require that commercial buildings above a certain size report their energy consumption data yearly to the EPA's Energy Star program. Energy Star uses a system called Portfolio Manager, through which property managers, building owners, or consultants enter building information to ensure compliance.
Portfolio Manager provides an API through which EnergyMirror can automatically upload energy bill information as soon as it is sent to the user.
Implementing this bridge to Energy Star's Portfolio Manager is a strong potential next step
When a building goes through a large energy efficiency project, such as a lighting retrofit, energy consumption drops significantly. The buildings paying for the proejcts want to visualize and verify those savings; the energy services providers want their customers to see the energy savings.
Allowing a user to create a project with a start date and visualize the difference is another potential feature