Normalizing Energy Use over multiple buildings

bg18461

Hi, I have a project where I am trying to compare energy usage over time for 5 buildings. They have different square footage and I would like to normalize the data so I am comparing apples to apples. If I have monthly data (kWH) and each buildings square foot, how would I normalize this data? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Cardew

Not sure what you mean by 'normalize'.

Are you are just talking heating? lighting? hot water? other electrical consumption?

The only relevance of the building's square footage is for heating. Strictly it should be cubic footage - if buildings have different height ceilings.

Are the buildings all single storey - two storey.

More details required.

bg18461

I am talking all encompassing, if I have a KWH value for the month for each building, and the sqft for each building, how can I get a fair comparison of each energy buildings usage on a per sqft basis?

Cardew

Building A uses 1000kWh and is 1000sq ft thus consumption is 1kWh per sq ft.

Building B uses 2,000 kWh and is 1345sq ft thus 1.487kWh per sq ft

etc etc

Cannot think what use such statistics might be though!

KimYeovil

What do you mean by 'fair'? If you just want to divvy it up according to size then that is trivial - you know how to do that (or ought to). But the number of rooms, the number of occupiers, the lifestyles of the occupants - they are all more significant.

A per square (or cubic) foot comparison is meaningless unless they all have the same heating set to the same temperatures and same times and all you care about is the relative heating costs/efficiency. And even in most of those restricted cases surely what you would want is cost per room, not per foot - a victorian high ceilinged single glazed full size room would consume more than a double-glazed matchbox but the cost per cubic foot would still turn out to be cheaper.

To normalise the data you would want to count the rooms (and type of rooms) and count the occupants. With a sample of five you will not be able to do any meaningful comparisons.