Interactive dashboard and exploratory analysis of household utility expenses since 2020. Many years of bills reveal rising electric costs, seasonal patterns, and the occasional billing headache.
Project Links
I built this project as a personal data diary to track my home utilities, a playful experiment that quickly became a compact case study in small-data analytics. What started as a way to capture everything from electric company headaches to Harvest Party cleaning discounts soon revealed clear inflationary trends, seasonal patterns, and energy-use tradeoffs. It’s proof that even small datasets can support meaningful planning, spark energy awareness, and tell big stories.
Project Overview
Utilities 313 is an interactive dashboard for exploring household utility expenses over time. The data reveals patterns in electric costs, seasonal fluctuations, and differences across utility categories, putting individual bills in a broader context.
Built with JavaScript (D3 and Plotly) and styled for mobile responsiveness, the dashboard features interactive tables and charts—including stacked bars, time series, and treemaps—that let users explore spending trends, compare utility categories, and examine changes in monthly expenses.
A companion Python-based exploratory data analysis (EDA) report, built in Jupyter Notebook with pandas and Plotly, provides additional views of spending patterns, annual comparisons, and variation in individual expenses. The analysis also illustrates a challenge of working with real-world data: provider changes, billing anomalies, and irregular payment timing required documented data-cleaning adjustments. A streamlined pipeline using the Google API helps keep the analysis updated with minimal manual effort.
The project brings together data collection, cleaning, exploratory analysis, and interactive visualization in a practical end-to-end workflow. One important limitation: because the data tracks spending, not consumption, rising electric bills may reflect higher rates, increased usage, or both.
Gallery
Interactive web dashboard: Toggle between cumulative and
per-person amounts, with a time filter slider for detailed expense
analysis.
Exploratory data analysis: Line chart tracking expenses by
category over time.
Stacked bar chart: Monthly utility bills by type, highlighting a
steady rise in electric expenses.
Monthly bills by year: Each line represents a year, revealing a
clear upward trend in expenses.
Monthly bills: Bar chart color-coded by year, further
illustrating increasing costs over time.
Treemap: Visual breakdown of expenses by utility type, showing
the proportion of each category.
References
Dataset provided by Utilities 313.