New Features at RoofRay – Social Modeling

We’ve added something I’ve wanted to create for a while – a simple way for people to not only model their own property – but their friends too.

It’s pretty simple when it comes to your own house because you
know your utility bill.  But to make “social modeling” work we need to
provide relevant and compelling information when usage is not known.

We’ve come up with a creative way to solve this by integrating the
Zillow API to get basic home stats and combining that with our
internal algorithm that includes items such as existence of pool,
local utility rates, etc.  And what’s really cool is that the
algorithm learns.  As users over-write what our algorithm comes up
with, it can grow smarter.

As the user draws a solar array they can view in real-time, via a
simple graph, what the percentage savings that array will have on the
existing electric bill.

And of course it has the ability to forward the model to that friend they’re trying to convince to get solar.

You can check it out at www.roofray.com/mass_modeling

RoofRay Surpasses 3 Billion kWh/yr in Arrays Modeled

We have over 200 million s/f or 3 billion kWh/yr of solar arrays on our system. Pretty cool.

This is sure to increase in a few weeks when we release our “Mass Modeling” product. More to come…

Fresh Updates at RoofRay

My apologies for the delay in writing. Ah the fun of fund-raising…

We’ve been busy over here. Let me outline what we’ve done:

• Released the RoofRay Widget. We had many people from bloggers to installers asking for a version of the drawing application. So we created Version 1 of the RoofRay Widget. Version one is a simple 3-Step Drawing | Costs & Savings | Free Quote application. As you’ll see we’re also excited that SunPower Corp is sponsoring the widget. We’ll be releasing an “Installer” version soon that contains no 3rd party ads and all leads go to them. More info to come…

• Simplified Navigation: The UI was, well lets say a bit kludgy. We simplified it into a 4 Step Process with “Draw Solar Array | Current Electricity Costs | Financial Analysis | Free Quote. What we think is better in this version is first of all – the simpler flow, but we’ve also moved some of the reports to the left-side navigation under “More Reports”.  We think this is cleaner and allows us to add more reports without muddying up the flow.   We’ve also moved the Utility Rates to the same left-side under “Assumptions”. So if you want to check and/or change them you can.

• Solar Guide: We added a nice Solar 101 page that outlines how solar PV works.

Other News

We continue to get some pretty great write-ups from Earth2Tech and others. RoofRay had the cool opportunity of being featured on CNBC’s “Powering the Planet” on Oct 6th. Here’s a URL to the vid.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=879731908

Rates Update Released

Before you get too excited we haven’t integrated all the utility rates from around the country. But what we did do, was allow for much more usefulness until that point.

This is how it works.

• When you model a location, if we have a specific utility rate, it will use it.
• If we don’t have a specific utility rate, it will provide you with two useful options:

1. Use the state average
2. (Based on user feedback) Enter your monthly or yearly usage and costs, and a cost per kWh will be derived.

Look forward to your feedback

Rates Update – next week

We’ve received a lot of feedback regarding the lack of utility rates for a user’s particular location.  We already had an update in mind but your feedback helped to refine it.  This what we’re releasing.

First, as you may or may not know, adding utility rates is primarily a human resource issue as opposed to a technology issue.  And right now as a small startup we don’t have the bodies to add every utility rate for every region of the country.  This will come, but not overnight.  So here’s the immediate plan.

• If your location has a corresponding utility rate, it will use that
• If no corresponding utility rate, it will use your state average as published by the Govt.
• Or, if you know your price per kWh, there’s a field for you to enter that.

We feel this is a good intermediary step that gives users better information and more value as we continue to add exact rate data.

Another idea we’re throwing around and would love feedback on is using a Wiki method of gathering rates.  This came about as we’ve seen numerous generous users emailing us links and data for rates.  What do you think?

One-Thousandth RoofRay

Things have been going crazy here.  In just a bit over a week, we hit our one-thousandth RoofRay drawn and over 100 million kWh hours per year of equivalent power.  Yeah, I know what you’re thinking – 100M / 1000 seems high.  Well it turns out there’s some enthusiasts tracing huge commercial roofs like Wal-Marts, Costcos, Targets, etc.  Pretty cool – keep at it.  Let’s show the world just how much power we can produce if we start utilizing this wasted real-estate.

Quick How-To on the “Shedding Light” section

This Shedding Light section, in my opinion is a diamond in the rough.  It’s one of the big differentiators of the site from other “enter your data, we’ll show you the results” sites. 

What’s the purpose of the Shedding Light Section?

1. We’re hoping that this is the nucleus of a ground-swell.  Where more and more buildings get modeled and we begin to see, in real detail, the potential solar can have.
2. It’s where you can see what others have done.  Specifically if you’re doing a complex array of an office building roof, you can view other commercial models and see how they were drawn.

What is the Shedding Light Section?

1. It’s where all the saved solar array models (RoofRays) are made available.
2. Did you know you could save any previously created RoofRay as a “Favorite” for your own account.
3. Did you notice on some RoofRays, something like “2 Additional Roofrays” right under the specs for this model.  That means there’s additional models for that same property.  It’s possible that you might model a home or building, and someone else might do a slightly different set of arrays.  In this case, the system will tell you there’s more than one model at the same location.
4. Have you noticed the “by user” with a clickable screen-name after it underneath the name of each RoofRay.  We believe there will be some advocates that desire to map full neighborhoods, or every Wal Mart in some city.  They not only should be recognized, by you may wish to follow them along and see what they’ve done.  By clicking the screen-name, the list will be filtered to just show RoofRays done by that user.
5. How about the – “Still Dream’n”.  Click this if an actual solar array has been installed at this location – and you can even enter the Installer – to give them recognition.

So check out the Shedding Light section and start shedding some of your own.

Feedback & Features

We’ve received a lot of great feedback from users and some common questions so I thought I’d try to answer them here.

Utility Rates:  What else can I say except that utility rates are a pain in the butt.  Naturally we added rates closest to use: PG&E, SoCalEdison, and SanDiego G&E.  Will will be adding others.  In the meantime we’ll be adding a “rate hierarchy” that starts from the most general, (state average) to the most specific (actually utility rate for zip).  So if we don’t have a utility rate yet, you’ll at least get state average comparisons.  But, and this will help a lot, we’ll also be including a fill-in box if you happen to know your rates so you can just enter it and we’ll remember it for you.  Look for this rate update in the next week.

RoofRay – The Launch

Wow – that was fun… sort of.  Got a great writeup by Earth2Tech, one of my favorite blogs, and the traffic started pouring in.  We weren’t as prepared as I would have liked to handle the load.  That was a bummer.  But do to the heroics of Jeff and Todd, we migrated the site to Amazon’s EC2 within 2 hours and now it’s smok’n.  Also got some good coverage at GigaOM, Treehugger, Boingboing, and Gizmodo