Toronto Hydro wanted to create a series of interactive games and calculators to educate the public on ways to conserve energy.

We brainstormed several possible solutions and were able to deliver multiple games and calculators.

My Home: an Interactive Consumption Calculator
The main deliverable was an interactive online calculator to accurately assess home energy use and provide energy saving tips as part of their initiative to provide awareness and tools to promote energy conservation.

This allows you to calculate where your energy dollars are spent by recreating your homes electrical requirements. Each appliance and its use are customizable and energy saving tips are provided as you see your energy consumption and cost calculations in real time.

The calculator needed to be easy to use, interactive, visual and fun. It included a set-up of a typical home and energy tips need to be relevant to each appliance. The calculator is pre-populated with common appliances for each room of each house based on house style: condo/apartment, bungalow, townhouse or 2 story home. There is also the option to build from scratch with no appliances pre-selected. Each appliance is easy to customize by editing type of appliance and how many hours you use it. Calculations happen in real time so saving are evident as user modifies each appliance.

The client can update the calculator by simply uploading a CSV (Excel) file to update new consumption levels for appliances and new rates. The user can print a completed report of appliance type, wattage, usage and kWh with total energy consumption and cost.

The Hog:
Challenge your energy know-how This game challenges players on their knowledge of energy conservation by pairing up two appliances in a head-to-head challenge where you need to answer which appliance consumes the most electricity. There are 10 challenges all racing against the clock, which gets faster and faster on each level of difficulty.

A Day at Wally’s: a Mystery Challenge Game
This game was created in response to the big blackout in Toronto a few years back. We created a series of characters to participate in a who-dunnit type of mystery game where the player needs to interview each one of the appliances by asking a series of questions to determine which appliance was responsible for causing the blackout.

Zap Factor: Trivia Challenge
A trivia game with questions related to energy conservation. The game is based on the popular “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” format and even includes 50/50 options. The game is timed adding to the challenge.

This series of interactive games promotes their goals of educating the public about energy conservation. The games were created with Swerve Design.