This aim of this article is to provide some high-level information about how our Toolkit can be valuable for Condominium Corporations with respect to monitoring energy usage.
Utility costs are typically a significant yearly operating expense for a Condominium Corporation. It is not surprising to see Condominium Corporations spend close to a third of their operating budget on utilities. Given that utilities can be a major cost for many Corporations, it is vital that Corporations are aware of their utility consumption behaviours.
The Function of our Toolkit
Our toolkit has the ability to process billing information from many types of utilities including: Electricity, Water, Natural Gas, Steam, etc. We also have observed that the primary factor that drives energy consumption is external temperature. Our Toolkit has access to historical and current weather data.
Consumption Prediction Model
As mentioned above, utility consumption has a strong relationship with weather. Our toolkit can access weather data and with your historical billing data can learn how each of your utilities are impacted by weather. With a reasonable amount of historical billing data and the application of various machine learning techniques, our toolkit can build a prediction model that can produce a expected consumption range based on current weather.
Model Prediction vs Future Consumption
Once a consumption prediction model is formulated for every utility type, the consumption in future bills can be compared to predictions built from weather data over the same billing period. By accounting for the primary factor of weather, consumption anomalies become much more pronounced and therefore easier to identify.
Addressing Outliers
Our Toolkit is effective at using consumption prediction model to identify utility usage outliers. However, the toolkit can only identify a potential concern. It can not investigate this issue. To address outliers, we must continue to depend on Property Managers to drive any investigations. The role of Property Managers and their staff is to determine if the unusual utility consumption has an valid explanation or if the unusual consumption is a indication of issues (mechanical or otherwise) that need to be addressed immediately.
Summary
While most Corporations rely on their Property Managers to identify any utility consumption anomalies, our experience has shown that the tools needed to account for weather prior to raising any alerts are currently unavailable. There are instances where a Board may acquire a member with an engineering background that builds a one-off tool to help their Corporation, but this is rare.
Our Toolkit allows any Corporation to leverage their historical billing data to effectively monitor their energy consumption.
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