Nu-Heat
Developing an interactive home carbon calculator to help people start saving carbon at home
Project overview
We’ve been working with the Nu-Heat Nu-Heat – the UK’s leading underfloor heating provider – on an ongoing basis since we created a their website, so when they approached us to help with a brand new project in 2021, we knew it would be another great project experience.
We were especially excited to help them with this request – to design and develop a carbon calculator that raises awareness of everyday carbon saving methods around the home. The result is the first interactive Home Carbon Calculator.
Features
- Data review
- Development of carbon calculator function
- Responsive, interactive design
- Fully customisable features
0.32g
CO2 per homepage view
96%
Lighthouse Accessibility score
98%
Lighthouse Performance score
“We’re passionate about helping people understand the ways in which they can reduce their environmental impact – beyond just heating their homes. This is how the Home Carbon Calculator was born!
Because statistics and statements only go so far, we wanted a way to show people the carbon savings small changes to their lifestyle can achieve, in easy to visualise ways.”
Liam Taborn, Digital Marketing Executive, Nu-Heat
Development of carbon calculator function
The design and development of this calculator went very much hand-in-hand, as the challenge was to design a cross-section of a home and fill it with interactive buttons that reveal various steps that we can all take to reduce our carbon footprint.
Our MD and Sustainability ‘Guru’ Tom, lent a helping hand to this project by reviewing the brilliant data that Nu-Heat had researched and collected on the subject, to feed into the development of the home carbon calculator.
The carbon calculator itself works much like our very own website carbon calculator. To see how much carbon they could (or already do!) save, visitors to the site make various selections of things they could do/are doing, and the calculator works out the sum of their total carbon savings.
Responsive, interactive design
We were super excited by the challenge this project presented, in creating a truly interactive design that would engage the audience visually with the easy ways they could create carbon savings.
We created a simple cross section of a house, showing all the main rooms people might have, with an interactive button in each room that reveals a list of actions you can take for each room, to reduce carbon.
As you select each item, the calculator tallies this as projected CO2 savings per annum, which are then visually translated to their equivalent number of trees or flights (London to New York), so that it’s easier to understand your impact.
Fully customisable features
Knowing that Nu-Heat might want to create carbon calculators for other settings, not just the home, we made the features fully customisable.
We hope that this home carbon calculator will help people begin to understand the impact that our actions in the home can have on the environment, and take the necessary steps to reduce or offset that impact.
At Wholegrain, we don’t just build wonderful websites that are good for the planet. We also help clients understand the environmental impact of their sites, using our own website carbon calculator.
This year, we’ve taken that one step further with our Digital Sustainability Consultancy service. We can help you quantify the impact of your website in real-time, by creating carbon cost audits and recommendations. We can also help you build your own carbon calculators, specific to your industry.
If you’re interested in learning more, do get in touch.
Great communication, friendly and very easy to work with – an extension of our own team.
