Changes to the Home Heat Loss Calculator

The calculator gets used several hundred times a day, so I thought some little cleanups were in order. 

Here is what changed and what did not..

- No algorithm changes were made, so the answers it produces are exactly the same as they were.

- Made a lot of formatting changes to make it more compact and easier to read.

- Added a plot to show at a quick glance how the heat losses of ceilings, walls, ... compare and which dominate.

- Added a Title field to make it easier to keep track of different runs -- especially printed ones.

- Put in some printing pagination to organize printed copies better.  You can probably print pages 2, 3, 4 and avoid printing all the boilerplate.

- Changed the CO2 emissions for electricity as a fuel from 2.2 lbs/KWH (typical of coal generation) to 1.5 lbs/KWH (average US generation). 

 


I hope to add saving input and output to a file at some point when the HTML5 files api is more widely supported.  For now, you can sort of save a report to a file by printing to a pdf.

I've tested this on later versions of Chrome, FireFox, Safari, Opera, and IE 9, and it appears to be OK on all.  The plot (and maybe some other things) are not going to work on older browsers.

If you have any suggestions, let me know. 

Gary  August 17, 2012