What is the Lightspark Energy Map?
Lightspark offers a comprehensive map of every house in your city. We apply artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and detailed data sets to produce a Lightspark Score for each single-dwelling property, and colour-code them according to their score — green meaning a particularly good score, red meaning a score that has a lot of room for improvement.
The Energy Map offers home-owners several tools to get the lay of their city’s energy efficiency landscape. First, homeowners can search for a property and see detailed information about their score, and the factors that contribute to it. These include products and upgrades like heat pumps, efficient windows, high-quality insulation, etc. Plus, it provides a comprehensive and cost-effective roadmap to improve their energy score through personalized product and upgrade recommendations that fit your budget, and will get you the most bang for your buck.
Next, it allows you to view the Lightspark Scores of other homes in your city, either by manually browsing the map, or by searching for individual addresses. This has several benefits for home-owners. For one — considering energy efficient homes are becoming more desirable — it can give you a sense of how well homes in your area will sell in the future. It also lets you see how your house’s energy use and carbon emissions stack up compared to other nearby homes.
How Does The Lightspark Energy Map Work?
We generate our energy map using the scores created by our advanced, AI-enabled platform. The Lightspark Score is a weighted indicator that combines estimated data on carbon emissions and energy use into one comprehensive number. Each Lightspark Score is scaled from 0 to 100. A higher score means that a home emits less carbon and uses less energy. Each score is normalized against the other homes in your city, and is relative to the highest and lowest scoring homes in the municipality. This way, you can be sure that every score on the map is relevant for your locale.
To calculate this, the Lightspark Score combines the total energy consumed and total carbon emitted by a single dwelling. We then take into account the emissions factor of the score based on that province or state’s publish emission factor. We scale scores using a benchmark value generated from a reference house — the house that requires the most work to be energy efficient.
Our platform normalizes every score to show the numerical difference of each home from a high-performing property and the property that requires the most work within their municipality. We then weigh the normalized scores (50% each), and subtract the weighted score from 1. The initial number in this calculation represents the amount of energy used and carbon emitted by a home.
What’s Next?
This final number is the Lightspark Score. The advanced metrics we use to generate this number also enable us to allot accurate and standardized numbers for individual products and upgrades that can improve the score. Lightspark produces one of these scores — along with huge amounts of valuable supplemental data and recommendations — for each single-dwelling in your city. Finally, our platform pinpoints and colour-codes each property on the map of your city using the Lightspark Score, resulting in the Lightspark Energy Map.
Our platform regularly updates this map to provide you with relevant, timely information about your home, and other homes in the city. It’s essential that the Lighstpark Scores and the Lightspark Map are up-to-date. As such, we work tirelessly to ensure you’re provided the best, most recent data available.
