Stuff you can do with spreadsheets

tempus_fugit

I was having a play around with a spreadsheet on Google Sheets the other day and knocked up a nifty tool to take the energy readings from the last two years (the time I have been at my present house), average them and create a forecast for the current year from the resultant data. The result for gas, as this is more seasonal than the electricity usage, is as per the screenshot below.



The blue line is usage for the last two years. The red dotted line is the forecast for 2019 based on the average from 2017 and 2018. The green dashed line is actual usage so far in 2019.

It's interesting to see the blue line with a double peak at the beginning of 2018 - the second peak is the Beast from the East.

Also, the usage for the start of this year is less than the forecast. This is because the forecast is being dragged up slightly by, again, the Beast from the East. Then, from about April, usage has exceeded the forecast because this year the warmer weather took longer to arrive. Only in the past couple of months has the usage line dropped below the forecast again due to the warmer weather in the past few weeks.

To build this spreadsheet I used the following guides:
Using the Forecast Function with Seasonality
Interpolate in Excel

I hope this is of interest in showing what can be done with a little work - this took me about two hours to set up with existing data.