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I got my A2AHP last year in May and ever since then I've actually been looking forward to the onset of winter to see how it will perform. It's actually doung quite well but in thinking about last year's data (collected so I could measure the performance for this heating season) it suddenly occurred to me that there is a point where you have used 50% of the heating energy for that season. I was walking the dog so I had to wait until I had got back home again, reasoning during that time that it had to be somewhere towards the end of January or perhaps even very early February.

 

Well, it turned out to be the 20th January so my title to this is actually misleading to the extent that local weather conditions could make it a warmer day rather than the coldest. So, keeping the title (never let the facts spoil a good title) the period between the 10th and the 30th January is likely to be the coldest period where you use the most heating and you could consider the 20th January to be the psychological turning point of winter. About a month after the shortest day.

 

Only 16 days to go!

 

Peter

 

Interesting question. Those familiar with the OVO Direct Debit calculator will have noticed the ‘cost’ chart which divides the year’s projected fuel cost into monthly chunks, with a little bit of seasonal adjustment. The adjustment is a blunt instrument, consisting of different weights for each month; I’ve been looking at this on and off for years, but I’ve not seen any change in the weightings. In my case, there’s only electricity involved, but I can’t see that there’s any way of fiddling them to allow for the obvious variations in usage pattern depending on whether heating is by gas, electricity or something else. 

These are the weightings that are used to calculate my DD:
  

  
If we assume that the winter semester starts on 1 October, then half of the semester’s electricity will according to this model have been used by 10:20 on New Year’s Eve (feel free to check my workings!).

I tried at one stage to fit these variations to a neat sine wave, but failed miserably because the downward slope in spring is very different from the upward autumn one. I’ve no idea where the numbers come from (and believe me, I’ve looked!)

I didn't know about that chart. Interesting.

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