Solar Save
The solar save project involved understanding the energy consumption pattern, creating a priority list, and designing the user interface to guide the user on the availability and consumption of solar power.
At the start of the project, we were tasked to understand how energy consumption takes place and for that, I took the most common appliance, which is present in most households, if not all, and that appliance is a fan.
The following buttons contain the links to the articles I had used to understand a fan's energy consumption and 1 article to understand energy consumption as a whole.
The buttons are in the order mentioned in the above sentence.
After the initial research, we created a priority list according to our understanding which is given as follows:
Fridge
Water Motor
Induction Cooktop
Cell Phone
Laptop
Lights
Fan
Water Heater
TV
AC
For the next step, we had to create a use case scenario as to how we might be able to manage the energy consumption, which is given as follows:
I wake up in the morning and get a notification that it is predicted to be cloudy for most of the day. There are only a fixed number of watts, which is not sufficient for regular use today, and I should lower the usage today by #### number of watts.
In the priority list, the lowest two devices are TV and AC, so I decide to make do with just the fan to keep the AC off for the day and choose to watch videos on my phone and read books to keep the TV off.
One more thing I am suggesting by the app is to keep the lights at 50%, with only one tube light powered on at a given time and only 2-3 bulbs powered on at a given time. Along with that to only use one mobile phone.
These Suggestions are given because the Fridge, Water Motor, Induction Cooktop, 1x Cell Phone, and Laptop are prioritized. The app is trying to ensure that these are not affected by less power unless necessary.
The app is going from the least important to the most important to save electricity by suggesting restricting or disabling for the day.
It also considers how many watts are required to power the device.
For another step, our faculty provided us with a project brief, and after taking inputs from each of the students in the class, he formulated a fixed user flow that all of us had to follow to create the app design.
The following is the image containing the project brief and the user flow.
And the extra thing I put in the user flow for me was as follows:
Notify user crossing the given time limit of any appliance/s
Following are some snapshots of the components that I created.
Screens that I developed
