Inspiration
One issue for many construction project managers is the potential costs of making a home LEED (sustainable) certified and whether or not the future savings make up for it. So we decided to build a small website that would take in some inputs (initially the address if it was a renovation or a zipcode and an estimate on the square footage if it was a new build). It would find the impact on the air quality, the potential savings in utilities, and the various benefits from insurance and tax incentives.
What it does
Our website asks for your address, which it then uses to find the air pollution in the area and the average price of utilities for single-family homes. It finds the impact of having a LEED-certified home, a home with a proper HVAC and ventilation system and built to use as few resources as possible. By utilizing APIs, we can find the potential improvement in air quality (in AQI) and utility savings over a year.
How we built it
Initially, we built this using HTML, CSS, and Javascript, but after many issues with implementing our APIs, we switched to wix to get our website up and running. We also used rapidapi.com and developer.google.com for APIs to get our idea running.
Challenges we ran into
There were many issues with fleshing out our idea, mainly because neither of us had any web dev experience. We relied on online tutorials and documentation to get our initial website up and running in html, css, and javascript and kept growing our website more and more to fit our idea. We hit a roadblock when trying to implement APIs to our website, and because of the time crunch, we swapped our website over to wix to get it finished and working.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Despite our many challenges and problems in setting up a seemingly rudimentary website, we grew by leaps and bounds. By first making a simple website with an output, then finding a way to make our website look pretty with CSS, to eventually messing around with APIs, in the short span of a weekend, we went from no knowledge to a working and functioning example. Despite our difficulties in the final leg of our build, I know that in the upcoming week(s), we can figure out what was wrong with our code and finally finish our website.
What we learned
We learned HTML, CSS, and Javascript to build a website from scratch. We also learned about designing using Figma and the importance and ease of implementing APIs into our website. Although we had to rely on a website maker to submit our build, we went from knowing nothing about web development and design to being only a fraction away from finishing an entire website with HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
What's next for LEED certification savings calculator
We'll first figure out why our APIs don't work with our code and fix that problem. After we have a working website, we'll use something like React to build our website again, this time (hopefully) in a smoother process. After that, we'll utilize more APIs to increase the number of outputs our program has and its accuracy. Hopefully, with enough time, we will have a working website that contractors can use and trust.
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