About Tools for Tenants

What is Tools for Tenants?

Tools for Tenants is a website to help renters factor energy usage into their purchasing decisions. We display energy consumption statistics for many apartments in Gainesville, and provide comparisons and visualizations to help consumers choose an efficient place to live.

Who made Tools for Tenants?

Tools For Tenants is produced by Acceleration.net, with sponsorship from:

Acceleration.net is a Gainesville, FL based software company.

What do we hope to accomplish?

We believe that providing information empowers people, and we hope to reduce energy consumption in the Gainesville area. We hope renters choose efficient apartments, spending less on power and more to improve their quality of life. We hope landlords invest in their properties, making efficiency improvements to attract energy-conscious renters.

Where did this data come from?

We obtained energy consumption from the utility, and then gathered apartment data manually. The utility data is screened in compliance with open records laws, stating monthly consumption (in kilowatt hours, kilogallons, or therms) for an address. We matched the utility data to apartment data based on address.

Learn more details about our data set.

Share your results

A comparison can be easily shared with your friends and roommates. Once you have narrowed down your results you can click the "Share" link and select one of the sharing icons to send and email or post your analysis to Twitter, Facebook, and many others.

Why isn't my apartment on here?

The process of matching apartments with consumption data is not easy. We are working to add more apartments, and improve our apartment information, but it's a painstaking manual process. Some apartment complexes have one utility meter for the entire complex, which makes it impossible to extract meaningful consumption data. Please let us know more about your apartment complex and we'll do our best to get it included.

Other questions?

Have a question, suggestion, or problem? Please fill out our Feedback form and we'll get on it.