What if condominium boards or property managers were able to accurately track of how much energy they were consuming? And what if they could uncover when the amount of energy used was higher than it should be? This is exactly what our toolkit aims to give condominiums. When this tool was originally tested, it identified an energy issue that had been undetected for over two months and had cost the condo corporation and it's owners over $100,000. Before leveraging an analytical process, the corporation had no systematic way of identifying issues. High consumption levels were typically accepted by assuming they were the result of changes in weather.
Building Utilities Management 101
Utility costs are a major expense for most corporations, and with prices consistently rising, they are likely to remain a significant burden. When monthly costs increase, alarms are often triggered, prompting investigations to identify the cause. However, these investigations typically rely on reviewing historical bills, which alone are insufficient for assessing changes in utility costs and consumption. Additionally, since utility bills are often stored as PDFs or physical documents, conducting a systematic analysis can be a nightmare.
A progressively minded corporation and/or property manager may track and record utility history electronically on a spreadsheet. Systematic data collection is necessary towards a better solution but, without the right tools, will still leave the potential issues hidden. Corporations can track consumption changes over billing cycles and visualize the history. (In the image below, the yellow line plots the consumption of each monthly bill).
When utility consumption spikes in a given month, it’s common for people to attribute the increase to abnormal weather, often supported by anecdotal accounts. By accepting this justification for the higher consumption and costs, the opportunity to identify underlying issues is lost.
The Impact of Weather
How do we confirm if an anecdotal story regarding weather over the past month did truly impact any utility consumption? If we are only looking at the consumption plotted across time, it would seem that the winter of 2019 was especially cold, and we would expect especially high levels of consumption as a result of nature. It does make sense that in colder months, more energy is required to heat many common building areas. But the size of the impact is hard to fully understand.
It's common knowledge that weather significantly impacts energy consumption. By using historical weather data from the Government of Canada's weather database, we can align each billing period with the average daily temperature for that period. By using historical weather data, we have an accurate way to compare energy consumption levels with prevailing temperature levels. However, manually scanning this information to assess weather’s impact is nearly impossible. Valuable insights can only be gained by leveraging technology and a systematic process to analyze all the data. Our toolkit offers condominiums an easy way to integrate multiple data sources and gain these insights.
A Little Math
Using historical energy consumption and weather data, a little math can be employed to model the relationship between weather and consumption. The generic mathematical technique that can be used here is called a polynomial regression and it allows us to quantify the relationship between the expected energy consumption for any given temperature.
The technique finds the best "fitting" line for the collection of points (as shown in the chart to the image above on the right where the blue line is "fitting" to the collection of yellow points) and also provides the accuracy of the fit that informs a reasonable range. Putting this together, we now have a tool that is able to objectively and systematically account for the weather.
The blue line indicates the expected range of consumption based on the temperature. And as we can now see, the actual consumption was much higher than the relationship of historical weather and bills say it should be. Thus, it wasn't an especially cold winter after all.
Summing It Up
After using the tool, the board quickly realized that a deeper investigation was necessary. The unusually high bills were traced back to a major issue: two opposing energy systems (steam and air conditioning) had been simultaneously heating and cooling the same area for the past two months, working against each other to maintain a baseline temperature. Without the tool, uncovering this underlying problem would have taken much longer, costing both the board and the owners significantly. It's rare for corporations to use this type of analytics for their utility bills, which we see as a gap in the system - one that inspired us to develop this tool. We hope it proves as valuable to you as it has been for us!
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