Colorado State University Extension just launched their solar calculator, and unlike some of our other projects, you can actually visit this one and try it out!
CSU Extension’s purpose is community outreach and research. The great people who work there want to help Colorado make better energy decisions, and this calculator is one piece of their plan. The calculator helps homeowners compare leasing and owning panels, estimate panel size, calculate energy offset, and see the investment’s value over 20 years. For the past five years, they had been providing the solar calculator as a detailed Excel sheet. But the spreadsheet was hard to manage, and the users were sometimes overwhelmed by the data needed to use it.
So CSU Extension decided to make the solar calculator into an online tool that had better instructions, a cleaner user experience, and more default values for beginner users. CSU was a great client to partner with, and we loved building this project. I hope you’ll check it out!