README

Copyright 2012 Bruno Girin, brunogirin@gmail.com

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

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This is a small web calculator written by Bruno Girin for Rewired State
National Hack The Government Day, 2012. It uses a small data set on home
insulation options for 3-bedroom semi-detached houses, provided as an Excel
file in the day's dataset:

datasets/decc/est/est-3-bed-semi-data.xlsx

This file was converted to CSV prior to being used so that it can easily be
read using the python language.

The resulting application is a small stand-alone web application written using
Django (see https://www.djangoproject.com/).

How to start the web server:
$ python manage.py runserver

You can then navigate to the web page at this address:
http://localhost:8000/energy

The application asks a number of questions about your house and finds suitable
energy efficiency improvements. It displays a number of data items for each
method, in particular the costs, savings and number of years needed for the
investment to pay for itself.

Things that can be improved:
- The presentation is very basic and would benefit from artwork and styling,
- The CSV file is read by the view class, it should be implemented as a model,
- The list of items returned should be ordered based on savings (either monetary
  or carbon savings) and grouped into categories.