Presenting a video walk-through of a sample energy report from Arctic Fox Energy Tracking–make your energy data accessible so you can focus on making energy saving decisions instead of just managing data.
Video Presentation
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Transcript
Hello, and thanks for joining me for this video walk-through of a sample energy report from Arctic Fox Energy Tracking. So let’s get right to it.
Each report here is laid out so you can access summaries of your data from the grand total level for the whole municipality all the way down through various subgroups, such as all the buildings, or one type of building, to the facility and meter level. We get this data directly from the utility companies and update your reports automatically each month, which has been saving time for towns as small as 1,000 people to some of the largest cities in the Lower Mainland of BC for almost 10 years now.
Let’s take a look at the Grand Total page first. This page is used to complete high level reports, for example to city council or the province, it’s simply a matter of copying and pasting the total energy use, cost breakdown, or greenhouse gas emissions for any month or year of interest. That means no more mucking around for hours with millions of numbers of spreadsheet data to get to this same result.
As we scroll down, we can see the data presented in a number of different ways. One favourite is the Top Consumers Graph for comparisons between facilities and to highlight candidates for energy audits and energy efficiency retrofits.
I’d like to focus on one set of usage graphs. Energy and Facility Managers are most interested in these graphs because they compare the current usage (which is the bold blue line) to the minimum, maximum, and average usage of the last 3 years (which is the blue shading in the background) so we can see at a glance how we are performing compared to previous years. If there is a spike in usage above the maximum of the last three years, as we see here for January and February, there may be an equipment issue somewhere that needs investigating. We’ve seen cases where catching these malfunctions early can result in many thousands of dollars of savings. There’s also an alert page in these reports that flag these large spikes or drops in usage.
The red line and shading shows heating degree days, which represent cold weather based on temperature data from the nearest weather station, so we can compare trends in usage to how cold it’s been.
We’re going to continue scrolling down to the data tables themselves. These are really the meat of the report. Here we can see the actual usage numbers, normalized to the month. Now this date normalization of the data is a really important concept so let me explain what’s happening here.
Meters are read sporadically throughout the year, which means the data doesn’t directly say what the usage was for a particular month, but that’s exactly what we need to know to make meaningful historical comparisons. To get there, we have to perform the calculation shown here, which is essentially taking the portion of any reading period that overlaps the month and adding them together. All the data that is graphed and summarized in the reports has already had this operation performed.
So back to the report. I’m going to briefly show you just one other page. We’re going to look at City Hall. Here we have the same graphs and data tables as the grand total page, but at the facility level, and we also have weather normalization and CUSUM graphs. These graphs attempt to subtract the effects of cold weather to make spikes in usage more meaningful.
Let’s scroll to the bottom. Here we also calculate some different metrics like usage per unit area, which you can compare to benchmarks so you get a sense of how energy-efficient your building is overall.
I know you’re busy, so we’re going to conclude the demo here. If you’d like to explore the sample report on your own, just use the web address shown here, or if you have any questions or interest in receiving a quote for energy tracking services, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us and we can schedule a time to chat. Hope to talk to you soon!