Articles About Degree Days and How Best to Use Them

Degree days are central to analysis of heating and cooling energy consumption, but it takes knowledge and experience to use them effectively. The articles listed here should help you understand what degree days are and how best to use them. Experience then comes from using the techniques described in these articles to analyze lots of energy data, for which you can download the degree days you need from our website.

Recommended articles

We think most people working with degree days would benefit from reading the following recommended articles. If you are starting from zero we suggest you work through them in order:

• Introduction to Degree Days – an easy read, for people who are new to degree days and the sorts of things they are used for. If you're already familiar with degree days you might want to skim through this introduction anyway as it covers some important points that you might not be familiar with, particularly with regard to how degree days are calculated.
• Degree Days – Handle With Care! – more advanced, this covers a wide range of topics relating to degree days and how to use them effectively. We wrote this article on our Energy Lens website before we created Degree Days.net, but it's just as useful today as it was when we wrote it, and we have updated it over the years too. Click back once you've read it to return here to Degree Days.net.
• Estimating the Base Temperature(s) of a Building – a detailed look at heating and cooling base temperatures and how to estimate them for any given building. This is important practical knowledge, as choosing appropriate base temperatures is critical for getting accurate results from degree-day analysis.
• Regression Analysis of Energy Consumption and Degree Days, with a focus on doing it in Excel. Regression is key to most data analysis involving degree days, so you will almost certainly need it. It's not so essential to know how to do it in Excel specifically, because our regression tool can do it for you (and is actually better than Excel for regression analysis of energy data), but going through the process in Excel will help you understand it more fully, and we believe this understanding will help you to use the regression tool more effectively to find the most appropriate regression models for your analysis.
• How to Calculate or Prove Energy Savings Using Degree Days and Regression with a step-by-step process. With the knowledge from the articles above you should be ready to apply this process well and calculate energy savings (or energy increases) that are accurate and justifiable.

Specialist articles

The following articles cover some more specialist aspects of degree days. We suggest you read only the ones that interest you or that cover something that could be applicable to your specific projects:

• Degree Days Calculation goes into much more detail on how degree days are calculated, by us and by other sources, and the pros and cons of the common methods. This is more detail than most people are interested in, but many inquisitive people find it useful nonetheless, and it is definitely worth reading if, for whatever reason, you are dealing with degree days from multiple sources.
• Weather Normalization of US Electricity Consumption Using Population-Weighted Degree Days – this may be useful if you are looking to analyze aggregate energy-consumption data e.g. for a city, state, or country. We cover the importance of population-weighted degree days, how to calculate them using our desktop app and Excel, and how to use them in regression analysis.
• Explanation of the Data We Generated for The Wall Street Journal for an article they did on the temperature comfort of 66 global cities, for WSJ readers in search of the ideal climate. It's not exactly what degree days were designed for, but they happen to be very useful for this sort of analysis.

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