Gainesville Green was created by Acceleration.net in conjuction with government and university groups. We are a small company based in Gainesville, FL, and offer nationwide broadband, hosting, server colocation, and programming services. Gainesville Green is the first deployment of our CityCarbon software solution. You can track the progress on our blog: http://blog.gainesville-green.com/

It varies, but as a general rule, take it with a grain of salt. This represents the combination of three databases, so we inherit inaccuracies from all of them. For homes with good data, the information should be very accurate. The rankings are often skewed by lack of data, and homes on the edges of town use Clay Electric instead of GRU.

Our data comes from a pain-staking process of combining information from a GRU database with other publicly available sources from the Property Appraiser and from the GIS center. This largly came down to matching addresses, with each data source having slightly different formats. In many cases, a direct match could not be made. We're planning another run through the unmatched data with some more lenient matching logic.

For now we've excluded apartments completely. Many of our calculations are based on square footage, and we don't have good data for the square feet of everyone's apartment. We've come up with a few schemes for how to adapt for that, and are debating the best option. The other complication is how to show each apartment visually on the map. Having hundreds of points for apartments will slow the site down considerably. So, there are some challenges here, and we're working to solve them.

This is another data problem, sometimes the property appriaser or GRU records had some inconsistency that prevented us from importing your home. Improving the data is our top priority, please check back in a few weeks, or follow our blog: http://blog.gainesville-green.com/

The rankings are based on your home's carbon footprint. This is calculated based on your electricity, water, and natural gas usage. For each KWh of energy you consume, a power plant somewhere generates some greenhouse gas, and the EPA measures the amount and publishes a series of conversion factors. Using those, we do some multiplication and add up how much CO2 you generate based on your electricity, water, and natural gas usage. These rankings are not of any official use and are not certified by anyone. Please use them as a rough guideline only.

This question originated in a great comment we received on our blog. There are several reasons you could still be behind your neighbors, despite significant improvement:

• Other homes could be much newer, which makes a huge difference. Ceiling insulation hasn't impacted as much, leaks have had less time to form, better construction materials, etc.
• Other homes could be much smaller, which also has a dramatic effect. Less space to cool and smaller air conditioners can save a tremendous amount of energy. It's unlikely you're ever going to get your consumption beneath a neighbor with a house half as large as yours.
• Other homes could be vacation or rental properties, having months of zero usage skewing their averages.

We're looking at making another ranking for 'Most Improved' which would cover your situation. We're also looking at changing the ranking scheme to better reflect home improvements, weighting recent data more than older data.

That's very possible. We're doing our best to combine the data cleanly, but sometimes we make mistakes. We've got another batch to import, and will be reviewing all our calculations when pulling that new information in.

Good question! If there's some feature or different way of looking at the data that you'd like to see, please let us know.