Anthony WalkerProduct Designer — SF

Case study — Denkiya

Denkiya

Making home electrification easier to understand, compare, and plan.

Denkiya dashboard on a laptop in a stylized park, showing appliance cards with Simulate Electric toggles and estimated energy costs

Denkiya is a home electrification planning tool that helps people understand how changes to their home, appliances, and vehicles affect their energy costs over time. It brings together household usage, local utility rates, available incentives, and equipment performance so homeowners can compare their current setup with efficient electric alternatives and make informed upgrade decisions.

Live product — go poke at it

Try it for yourselforBrowse the component library

The Challenge

Electrifying a home involves a surprising number of interconnected decisions. Appliance costs, energy use, utility rates, rebates, fuel prices, solar, and future upgrades are usually researched separately, making it difficult to understand what actually makes financial sense for a particular household.

  • Turn complex energy calculations into understandable consumer decisions.
  • Support very different products and energy sources within one consistent comparison model.
  • Make assumptions transparent without overwhelming users with technical detail.
  • Balance quick exploration with deeper planning for people who want to model future upgrades.

The Outcome

  • Designed and built a working product spanning vehicles, water heating, laundry, cooking, HVAC, solar, and other household energy decisions.
  • Created a reusable comparison framework incorporating local energy prices, product efficiency, incentives, operating costs, payback, and lifetime savings.
  • Developed the product from initial concept through research, interaction design, visual design, data modeling, and implementation.
  • Built and documented a reusable component library in Storybook, keeping the interface consistent as the product grows.
  • Established a foundation for shareable household scenarios and future collaboration between homeowners and contractors.
Diagram of Denkiya as a home energy decision engine, combining utility rates, fuel prices, household details, equipment performance, climate data, usage patterns, and incentives with vehicles, water heating, HVAC, laundry, cooking, solar, and storage
Denkiya Home Setup dashboard showing home details, baseline electricity, vehicles, appliances, and energy costs

Whole-Home Energy Model

Most electrification tools address one decision at a time. Denkiya treats the home as a system, allowing users to model vehicles, water heating, cooking, HVAC, solar, and other loads together so that one upgrade can be understood in the context of everything else.

Denkiya gas water heater costing $438 per year, compared with a simulated heat pump water heater that saves $117 per year versus gas, or $438 per year when its $321 operating cost is covered by solar

Apples-to-Apples Comparisons

The cheapest appliance to buy is not always the cheapest one to own. I designed a comparison model that combines upfront cost, incentives, energy use, local rates, maintenance assumptions, and expected lifespan to show both immediate and long-term financial impact.

Three Denkiya onboarding screens on mobile: home layout and size, what each appliance runs on, and phrases describing home comfort

Personalized to the Household

Energy decisions depend heavily on where and how someone lives. Denkiya uses household characteristics, usage patterns, local electricity and fuel prices, climate data, and available incentives to replace generic estimates with results tailored to the individual home.

Denkiya savings summary estimating $7,272 per year from electrifying the whole home and all vehicles, itemized by already-electrified and simulated upgrades

From Exploration to a Plan

Individual comparisons can be combined into scenarios, helping users explore what their home might look like after several upgrades. The same underlying model is designed to support shareable plans and contractor proposals, creating a path from early research to real-world implementation.

See it in action

Now, stop reading, and take it for a spin!

Denkiya is live. Plug in your own home (US addresses only for now) and see what going electric might actually save you — trying it is a lot more fun than just reading about it.

Try it for yourselforBrowse the component library

Next steps

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