A2PBEER Retrofit – European Application Development Project

Our team undertook this cross-European application development project with a brief to provide a web portal for building owners to estimate the energy use of their building and get recommendations on how to improve the buildings energy efficiency.

An existing WordPress based website was being used for the company’s main website so we decided to use the WordPress API as a codebase for developing this database-driven project.

Among other elements of this project was the following functionality

• A membership site with registration and login functions
• Administration for site owners to update content and update the database
• Ability for building owners to completely define their building characteristics and get immediate recommendations for improving their buildings energy efficiency.
• A searchable database of technologies that could be
  1. Searched and filtered by category
  2. Auto-filtered for the building owner based on their building characteristics
• A stakeholders feature allowing building owners to define the stakeholders in the system and assign a relevance score to that stakeholder
• A standards feature where building owners can compare the energy performance of their building compared to their recommended national standards
• Integrated charting system completed using the HighCharts JavaScript charting system

Our clients were very happy with the functionality and ease of use of this system. Minimal training was required due to the clear interface design and easy pathway through the project.

The Building Characteristics section allows users to define the exact spec of their building. The system then provides recommendations on improving the energy efficiency.

The technology recommendations are provided on-screen and as a customised PDF download .

We used the JavaScript charting system “High Charts” for creating interactive on-screen charts.

This customise stakeholder graph was created with a combination of High Charts and our custom code.