We can start to intuit the requirements of tenant comfort throughout the year by visualizing the energy use of heated-and-cooled buildings.
Each point represents a building tracked by WegoWise. WegoWise automatically scrapes the buildings' monthly bills to determine their energy use. We can compare between buildings and between fuels by calculating the energy use intensity (EUI): the energy used (converted to common units: kBTU, or 1000 BTU, in this case), divided by the floor area of the building.
For this pair of variables — gas EUI and electric EUI — the time variation generates a striking impression of buildings 'flocking' through energy space. The demands of electric air conditioning in the summer trade off with the larger gas heating footprint in the winter months.
The constant base load of electricity for lights and appliances displays a higher relative spread than the gas base load. The overall spread becomes larger during the winter and summer, when use increases, pointing to opportunities for energy savings.
With WegoWise, property owners can see where in the 'flock' they move, by benchmarking their use to similar buildings.
- Click the month to pause the animation, then navigate month-by-month with the triangle buttons.
- The buildings represent a subsample of multifamily properties in the WegoWise database, tracked over the most recent 12 months of data.
- The color variations only serve to distinguish points.
- Note that the Gas EUI scale has been compressed, to show the smaller spread along the Electric EUI axis.
- The buildings are gas-heated and have electrical cooling systems.
- Common area and residential area usage are summed together.
- The site EUI is displayed.
- The data are current through January, 2014.