Joshua Lloyd is tracking a Home (Residence) in Columbus, OH with GreenQuest. This building is approximately 2,254 square feet in area, was built in 1965 and has 3 meters: Electric, Natural Gas, Water.
Joshua is using GreenQuest in an effort to save energy and get a handle on energy spending! You can too. To find how you can learn about energy spending, weather data, greenhouse gas emissions and energy use for your building, click here.
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Electric
Natural Gas
Water
Your Carbon Footprint is the amount of greenhouse gases that are expelled to the atmosphere due to your activities. Greenhouse gases are usually reported in terms of equivalent metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2). A metric ton is 2,205 pounds.
Greenhouse gases contribute to global warming and may soon be regulated, capped, and even fined, so tracking greenhouse gases is an important first step.
GreenQuest calculates and charts your annual Carbon Footprint, or more correctly it charts that portion of your carbon footprint that is due to the electricity and fuel bills that you entered in GreenQuest.
This long-term trend chart provides a valuable picture of how your energy usage is changing over time. Each vertical bar is one month. Electricity and fuel (if tracked) are converted to common units of BTUs per sq ft. (One BTU is about the amount of energy in a wooden matchstick.)
Depending upon a number of factors such as location, climate and building equipment, your energy usage each month may be about the same, or you may see much greater usage in winter or summer or both.
The blue line shows the 12-month running average. In other words, in month #12 GreenQuest displays the average monthly BTU/Sq Ft of months #1-12. In month #13, point is displayed for months #2-13, months #3-14 are shown in month #14 and so on. In this way the blue shading illustrates the running average. The running average is valuable because it shows you the long-term trends. Hopefully, your energy efficiency efforts are causing the blue line to slope down to the right. If the blue line rises or levels off, it may be time to investigate further investments in energy efficiency.
GreenQuest overlays your completed projects (use My Projects to set these up) to help you see which project result in downward trends. Because the blue shading is a trailing 12-month average, it may take a few months for the impact of energy projects to become evident.
The following trend charts overlay each year of usage, cost, and unit cost information. The more years of data that you track in GreenQuest, the more valuable the charts. If usage is going up over the years, then this user is using more energy. Costs will be direcly proportionate to the unit costs. If costs are rising, it could be because this user is using more energy, or because the cost of the commodity is rising.
It’s valuable to understand if and how the weather affects your energy usage. This can help in budgeting, year-to-year comparisons, and explaining why you used more or less energy.
On the left chart, GreenQuest plots the last twelve utility bills. Each blue dot is a bill. The vertical axis is the average daily usage of the bill and the horizontal axis is the average number of degree days per day. The black line is the regression line, a statistical correlation of usage vs. weather.
If the line rises to the right, it means that months with more degree days (hotter months when you’re looking at summer, colder months when winter) have more usage. This suggests that a portion of the usage is weather sensitive. If the statistical correlation is strong enough, we can say that the usage of this meter in this season is weather sensitive. The summary area shows you how sensitive.
If the line is nearly flat or falls to the right, it means that months with more degree days (hotter months when you’re looking at summer, colder months when winter) do NOT have more usage. This indicates that the usage of this meter in this season is NOT weather sensitive.
You may ask which months are shown as summer and which as winter. It depends. A summer month is a month that has cooling degree days and a winter month is one that has heating degree days. To have cooling degree days, you must have at least one day in which the mean daily temperature was above 60. To have heating degree days, you must have at least one day in which the mean daily temperature was below 60.
The right side chart is a simpler view of usage vs. weather. The blue line is January through December energy usage, plotted as usage per day. Overlaid on that in orange is the weather, plotted as degree days (cooling degree days on the summer chart and heating degree days on the winter chart). You can quickly see if the months with high orange degree days “push up” the blue usage line or have no affect on the usage line. This is another way to visualize the impact that outside temperature may have on your energy usage.
© 2010 EnergyCAP, Inc.