How Do You Analyze Weekend-Weekday Consumption Profile Differences? | Video

CIET's Ask Us Anything series is a free monthly Q&A session with industry experts.

The How to Analyze Your Energy Data session featured Stephen Dixon, CIET Trainer and RETScreen® Expert.

If you missed it, here is a key topic that was discussed during the session.

Question: How do you deal with weekend-weekday consumption profile differences?

Answer:

If I'm looking at interval data, sometimes there's no differences between the weekend and the weekdays.

Looking at it on a time series, looking at a weekly basis, certainly I can start to interpret what's happening. If you're talking about taking that data and starting to do a regression analysis on it where you're using a different amount of energy on a weekend day versus a weekday, then what I like to do is to use a binary variable in my RETScreen® analysis, or my regression analysis, to indicate whether it is a weekend or a weekday. From there, that will generate an equation which allows me to account for the differences between the weekend and the weekdays.

But to me, the first thing to do is to lay it out on a graph and look for differences. Sometimes the fact that the weekend is no different from the weekday is a very alarming thing. But it's also a big opportunity.

You can also look at the way chillers are cycling during a weekend period versus a weekday.

The other thing you could do within RETScreen® is to use the filtering feature. You filter out and only plot certain days, if you want to do it that way. Excel will do the same thing quite nicely.

Did you miss this Ask Us Anything session?

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