Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Calculating Baseline Energy Use

Now that you've collected a year's worth of utility bills and converted all your energy use numbers into consistent units (KWH, probably) you can calculate your baseline energy use.

Your baseline energy use gives you an estimate of how much energy the basic operation of your home requires when you subtract out seasonal effects. If you live in a warm, humid climate where you run an air conditioner for much of the year, your overall energy use will probably be dominated by cooling. Conversely if you live in a "heating-dominated climate", your winter months will show a significant spike in energy use. If you live in an area with great seasonal temperature swings (hot summers and cold winters), you may find that there are a couple of temperate periods in the spring and autumn.

Calculating your baseline is simple. Here are the steps.
  1. Put your twelve months of bills in order. Again, it doesn't matter what the starting and ending months are, just that you have all the months in a twelve month period.
  2. Total your energy use for each month. To do this, first convert all your energy use bills into one type of units (KWH is probably best). Then add the KWH's from each source to give you the total energy use for each month expressed in consistent units.
  3. Identify the three lowest energy use months. Average these. In other words, add the energy use values for the three lowest months and then divide that number by three.
This number is a good representation of your energy use baseline. It tells you how much energy you use to run your lights, cooking appliances, refrigerator, hot water, entertainment and computer gear month in and month out.

If there are great differences between heavy energy use months and your baseline, you might want to investigate things like patching leaks, increasing insulation (by a large amount), upgrading windows and/or window coverings, and perhaps even looking at upgrades to HVAC systems.

We'll dig into this more in future posts.

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