Heating Cost Calculator

Inspiration

The Project was supposed to relate to a Month, and we chose the month of winter. We know that heating and energy costs are extremely high around this time of year, noted by when our family members tell us to mind how long the heating systems are on or not.

What it does

Calculates heating cost based on users information such as energy providor, energy plan, gas or electric, ect

How we built it

We built this project in Python, using calculations found on the internet to calculate BTU(British Thermal Units), as well as calculating energy costs based on different energy plans.

Challenges we ran into

We had a hard time finding enough time to fully fledge a nice looking UI, as well as implementing all Toronto energy companies for cost calculation, as this would have taken too long considering how long it took us to find and put together the formulas for the different plans of one company, so instead we chose one company for gas and electric to represent energy costs. In the future, this can be scaled to add all the companies and their energy and cost plans.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Throughout the day losing energy and running into difficult challenges such as finding the formulas and understanding the topic and what we needed to complete the project was a big roadblock in our moral, and getting through that in order to create a rough prototype of our program that is fully functional is a huge accomplishment, as well as all the research that went into understanding the problem.

What we learned

We learned a lot about how energy cost is calculated, and how insulation efficiency calculations and R-values work within the formulas.

What's next for Heating Cost Calculator

Adding more companies plans, as well as fully fledging out a suggestion system based on everything we currently know about the user. In addition, we can also scale this outward, to different cities in Ontario.