Heating, Electricity, and the Other Ten
Tracking the 12+ lifestyle categories most footprint apps quietly skip
⚡ A footprint is not two categories
Most tracking stops at food and travel, because those are the parts with obvious moments of choice. But a large share of a household’s emissions comes from things that never present themselves as a decision — the heating, the electricity, the water, the waste. Leave them out and the total is not a total; it is a subtotal wearing the wrong label.
What Decarbonr actually counts
Alongside food and 9 transport modes, Decarbonr tracks 12+ lifestyle categories — heating, electricity, water, waste, digital and more — each colour-coded by impact so the large ones separate themselves from the small ones at a glance. Everything resolves into one daily number rather than a dozen scores you have to reconcile yourself.
Three inputs, one number
| Input | How it is logged |
|---|---|
| Food | AI photo scanner or barcode — ingredient-level estimates |
| Travel | 9 transport modes, distances auto-calculated from city pairs |
| Home & lifestyle | 12+ categories — heating, electricity, water, waste, digital… |
Transport factors come from the European Environment Agency and IPCC; food factors from Poore & Nemecek (2018). Full tables on the research page.
The point of the colour-coding is triage. Nobody needs four decimal places on their laundry; they need to know which two categories are doing most of the damage. That ordering is the entire value of measuring in the first place.
Why home energy deserves its own row
Residential energy use accounts for roughly 20% of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, according to a study of 93 million households published in PNAS in 2020. The same work found that emissions per unit of floor space vary widely by region, driven by climate and by the fuel mix of the local grid — and that wealthier households carried per capita footprints around 25% higher, primarily because their homes were larger.
That is a category of comparable size to food or travel, moved mostly by heating fuel and building size rather than by anything you do on a given Tuesday. It is exactly the sort of thing a tracker should surface rather than assume. The full write-up of that study covers what it did and did not find.
A number needs a reference point
Knowing you emitted a certain amount today tells you nothing on its own. Decarbonr places that figure against national averages worldwide and against the 2-tonne annual target — roughly 5.48 kg per day — that the IPCC associates with limiting warming to 1.5°C. The dashboard ring sweeps from red through amber to emerald as you close the gap, which is a blunter feedback signal than a table of numbers and a more honest one.
There is also a projection layer: the app translates your habits into the temperature the world reaches by 2050 if everyone emitted what you do. It is a framing device rather than a forecast, but it converts an abstract personal quantity into something with a scale attached.
Keeping it going past week one
Measurement fails when it becomes a chore. Decarbonr leans on goals, streaks and achievements, plus personalized, country-specific reduction tips — a suggestion is only useful if it applies to the grid and the infrastructure you actually live with. A tip about heat pumps means something different in Norway than in Poland.
Alongside that sits a built-in library of timelines, explainers, carbon calculators, country data and quizzes, with eco-points for working through it. The app is available in 90+ languages on iOS 17.6+.
🔒 Your home data stays in your home
A log of your heating, electricity and daily movements is a detailed record of your life. Decarbonr stores it locally on your iPhone. There is no account to create, nothing synced to a server, no analytics profile, no third-party tracking and no ads.
Decarbonr is a subscription with a free trial — cancel anytime; AI photo and barcode scanning are an optional add-on on top of the app. See the no-account design or the privacy policy.
⚠️ Important note
Decarbonr produces estimates, not measurements. Emission factors are averages drawn from published research and vary by region, grid mix, season and supply chain. Use the figures to compare options and spot patterns, not as precise accounting. This page is general information, not personalized environmental or energy advice.