Improving the usage tracker: more ideas on using temperature data and user notes to improve home efficiency

A great feature idea, @Arthur Mactavish - detailed and specific. I’ll get this idea changed to a ‘Open for votes’ status which will send it to the products teams involved. 

There’s a slight delay with some of these ideas getting responses but we’ll make sure this happens one way or another. It’s been a busy few months for energy suppliers! 

Sorry @Tim_OVO , a small additional thought:

For  me, it would be helpful if some measure of solar radiation was available.  This would help OVO to better advise people on how well their home is doing

       -  The level of solar radiation will obviously have a big effect on home energy use, and will vary significantly from day to day, on a seasonal basis, and geographically too.

Cheers, Peter

Thanks for the additional details for this idea, @Arthur Mactavish.

Can you help anyone looking at this idea (and perhaps me as well) with solar radiation and home energy usage - would this be mostly in regards to heating the home?

What are the implications for high or low solar radiation and energy use that the energy tracker could help with?

Actually I think there is a much better metric available than "temperature". After all, which temperature is relevant - min, max, average, daytime min/max/avg, overnight min/max/average?

None of them really convey the heating needs for that day/night.

A better option, which I admit I only discovered recently, is a thing called "Degree Days". It actually looks at the temperature profile throughout each 24 hour period (typically per hour or half hour) and calculates the difference between outdoor temperature and desired indoor temperature for each hour or half hour of the day. Then it sums up how many heating degrees are needed per day.

I was first introduced to the concept by a YouTube video by Michael de Podesta and his blog article here.…

https://protonsforbreakfast.wordpress.com/2022/03/15/heating-degree-days1-a-brilliant-idea/

I've used this site - https://www.degreedays.net/#generate - in order to generate Degree Day reports daily/monthly/annually for a better comparison between weather/climate at the time vs my heating costs. It works. And it's far more informative than a "temperature" value, which doesn't paint the whole picture.

For me, daily mean temperature would be sufficient for a useful, easy analysis.

   -  I would be happy to do some initial analysis if I’m given some data to play with (I’m a climate scientist, so this is fun for me).

I certainly agree with @eezytiger that the metric they suggest is better in principle than temperature alone (the equation for the heat budget of the home has this temperature difference in).

      -  Certainly, for people who know what temperature they keep the home at each hour of the day, if they had an option to input that data, it would improve the analysis.

     -  However, not everyone would know this, or be bothered to enter it. 

     - In most homes, the internal temperature at a given time of day would not vary much from day to day (because of thermostat).  Also, there is the complexity that different parts of the home would tend to be at different temperatures, so there is no single value for the internal-external temperature difference.  Another issue is the fact that bricks retain heat, so there is a lag between the air temperature and the temperature of the bricks.

Thanks @Tim_OVO .

Sorry, yes, I was thinking purely of home heating with this suggestion (same comment applies to the air temperature).

Say you compare two days with exactly the same outside air temperature (through the whole 24 hour period), but one day is sunny, but the other is overcast.   The home would need less heating on the sunny day than the overcast day, because the sun heats the home (like a greenhouse).

    - This effect depends of course on how much sunlight can get in through the windows.  We are lucky enough to live in the south west, and to have two south-facing windows that get a decent amount of sunlight.  This has improved recently as the neighbour cut down her tree.

   - Other houses may have more/less glass facing the sun and live in more cloudy area.

Does that help?

That makes sense to me @Arthur Mactavish. While I have weather compensation enabled for my boiler, it is noticeable if the weather outside is sunny how much warmer it feels in the house. The outside conditions seem to have as much effect on the ‘feel’ inside as the actual temperature difference.

I appreciate that this is not as scientific as a measurement but I do believe that a value attached to the conditions would help with the adjustment of heat requirements indoors 

BTW, I think that if we had solar radiation (as well as temperature and energy usage) data, potentially there are two characteristics of a home that might be estimated, that could help people decide how to improve their home (and potentially even to target home improvement grants):

• A measure relating to insulation
• A measure relating to how efficiently the home can be heated by the sun (a home with lots of south-facing windows would score highly here).
• [There is a complicating factor about the energy efficiency of the heating system. I'd have to think about this].

The energy flows in/out of a home would be a balance:

• In: solar radiation (mostly through windows) and internal (e.g. central) heating (also, residual heat from cookers, dryers and other appliances).
• Out: cooling to the outside.
• Over short times, there's also some energy flow in/out of storage in bricks