Degree Days.net - Frequently Asked Questions
There are a few questions that we get asked fairly frequently - we've tried our best to answer them clearly below:
When I download the data I see ######## where the dates are supposed to be. What's gone wrong?
The # symbols just mean that you need to make the column a little wider in Excel. Excel shows # symbols when a column isn't wide enough to display the dates or numbers contained within it.
Position your mouse between the labels for column A and column B, hold the left button down, and drag the column wider. The animated screenshot on the right should help to make this process clearer. Alternatively you can double-click the mouse between the two columns to make Excel auto-fit column A.
What base temperature should I choose?
The optimal base temperature depends on the building. You can never determine it perfectly (degree-day-based calculations can never be that accurate), but using degree days with a base temperature that's approximately right for your building can significantly improve the accuracy of your calculations.
If you're uncertain about what the base temperature means, we suggest you read this introductory article. That should help you to make a very rough estimate of the base temperature of your building.
To get a more accurate estimate we recommend regression analysis (you'll probably need to read the whole article to make sense of it but, at the bottom, there are step-by-step instructions for determining the optimal base temperature).
How can I separate my heating/cooling energy consumption from everything else?
Ideally you'd have your heating and cooling energy consumption metered separately. But, if that's not an option (e.g. because you have a all-electric building with one meter only), you'll need to make estimates...
"Baseload" consumption is a term that's used to describe the energy consumption that doesn't depend on the weather, and that's typically pretty constant throughout the year. If you can estimate your baseload energy consumption, you can deduct it from your recorded consumption figures to get an estimate of the consumption that's heating or cooling only.
You can often estimate the baseload by investigating the consumption over a period when the heating/cooling was switched off. Though the approach that's usually recommended is regression analysis.
Baseload energy consumption is a very approximate concept for most buildings. It's often important to estimate it and remove it from consumption figures, but it can be difficult to do this well. This article explains more about the relevant issues.
What should I do when I've got both heating and cooling energy consumption metered together?
The best option would be to separate the heating and cooling energy consumption by metering them separately. But, if that's not possible, you might still be able to do some useful analysis, provided you have a seasonal pattern of heating and cooling (e.g. with heating in the winter and cooling in the summer). If that's the case, we suggest that you do two separate regression analyses - one for heating and one for cooling. But don't use the whole dataset for each of the analyses; instead, split your data into:
- Heating data from the periods over which the heating was on but the cooling was off.
- Cooling data from the periods over which the cooling was on but the heating was off.
Do a regression analysis on the heating-only data (1), and a separate regression analysis on the cooling-only data (2). To improve your two regression analyses use the approach described here for finding the optimal base temperature (bearing in mind that it will probably be different for heating and for cooling).
Once you've done your two regression analyses, you'll have two formulae - one for heating and one for cooling. For each future period of consumption you'll have to decide which one of these two formulae to apply... It will depend on whether the period is predominantly heating or cooling - you, or an 'IF' formula you've created in Excel, could look at the HDD and CDD of the period to determine this. Or, if you're feeling ambitious, you could try weighting the results of your two formulae according to the relative proportions of HDD and CDD in the period.
When you're splitting your periods of consumption into heating periods and cooling periods, you might find periods that saw both heating and cooling (and HDD and CDD). It's very hard to do anything useful with data that includes significant amounts of heating and cooling energy consumption together. We suggest you leave these periods out of both your regression analyses. If you have a lot of periods like these, it might be an indication of one of the following:
- You have an inefficient HVAC system that is attempting to keep your building at constant temperature. Much better is to leave a gap between the temperature below which the heating comes on and the temperature above which the cooling comes on. Otherwise you'll end up with the heating and the cooling battling it out and wasting lots of energy. If possible, fix this before worrying about HDD and CDD - it'll save you a lot more energy than any calculations can!
- You're using HDD and CDD with the wrong base temperatures. Your HDD base temperature should usually be different to your CDD base temperature.
One final note: the more that heating, cooling, and non-weather-dependent energy usage are mixed together in your metered records of consumption, the less reliable any degree-day-based analysis can be. If you've not yet read our Degree Days - Handle With Care! article, please do.
Can we buy your database of degree days?
We don't actually have a database of degree days... Each set of degree-day data that you download from Degree Days.net has been freshly generated from raw temperature data, just for you. It's this on-demand approach that enables us to offer all the options that we do (thousands of weather stations, lots of base temperatures, a choice of timescales etc.).
This might not be the best analogy, but here goes anyway... Most sources of degree days are like times tables - the results are calculated in advance for a fixed set of numbers (or locations and base temperatures). Degree Days.net is more like a calculator: you tell it exactly what data you want, and it calculates it for you there and then.
Anyway, analogies aside, if you want to buy a database of degree days, we suspect that you'll be interested in the following two questions and answers:
Is there a way for our software to access the data from your site automatically? Like through an API or a web service?
Yes! The Degree Days.net API makes it easy to automate the process of getting data out of our system.
Click here for more information about our API.
I'm not a programmer, but I want to be able to download data from multiple locations at once. Is there a way for me to do this?
Yes! With Degree Days.net Desktop you can specify a big list of locations and download data for all of them into a single spreadsheet.
If you've seen this page before you might remember us talking about the possibility of a Degree Days.net Excel add-in. That was our original thought, as we wanted to take advantage of our experience developing this Excel-based energy-management solution. But we decided in the end that a standalone desktop app would be better for downloading data - more user friendly and more powerful. And we think it's turned out very well!
Click here to find out more about our desktop app.
I've downloaded daily HDD and CDD for the same location and base temperature. On some days there are non-zero values for both - how can this be?
Outside temperatures vary throughout the day, so keeping a building at a constant internal temperature can often require both heating and cooling on the same day (e.g. heating in the morning, cooling in the afternoon). Degree Days.net calculates data in a way that takes into account the temperature variations within each day. This makes the calculation process more complicated, but it results in degree days that correlate better with real-world energy consumption.
If you want to understand this better, please read our page on calculating degree days. Though there's no real need to understand the calculation process if you're just using the data for your own calculations.
On a related note: using heating and cooling to maintain a constant internal temperature is bad for energy efficiency. Typically you want the internal temperature above which the air conditioning comes on to be a few degrees higher than the temperature below which the heating comes on. Assuming you're doing this in your building(s) you will typically also want HDD and CDD with different base temperatures.
I've downloaded data from your site and from another source (e.g. NOAA). The figures don't seem to match exactly - why is this?
Firstly, temperatures recorded by different weather stations at nearby locations can vary by quite a surprising amount. This is why it's good to use data from a weather station that's as close as possible to the building that's energy consumption you're analyzing.
Secondly, it's likely that the two sets of data you're comparing were calculated using slightly different methods. We calculate degree days using a more sophisticated method than many other sources.
Finally, it's possible that you're actually comparing the data from our site with population-weighted degree-day data. Population-weighted data can be useful for utilities that are doing simple aggregate analysis of energy consumption across a large region (e.g. the state of California), but it's not so good for analysis of the energy consumption of individual buildings.
How do you calculate degree days?
We've made a whole separate page about degree-day-data calculation.