Seasonal energy adjustment factors

Note

It most cases it is preferable to create a profile item in /home/energy/quantity and set its season value rather than a creating a profile item in this category.

Explanation

Profile items in this category convert a quarterly value for a season to a seasonally adjusted annual equivalent. For example, the algorithm multiplies a gas value for the summer quarter by a factor of 8.33 to obtain the annual figure. Simply multiplying a summer quarterly value by 4 would lead to an underestimate of the annual usage because energy consumption is lowest in the summer.

Note that no units for the fuel type is assumed. This means you can give the profile item a quarterly figure in any units, e.g. usage in litres or kWh or currency or even a quarterly CO₂ figure, and it will return a monthly value in the same units.

Example

If you use 1000 kWh of gas during autumn and want to know an equivalent annual total which includes seasonal weighting, you would create an item name=autumn&energy=gas, with usagePerQuarter=1000. The return value will be 8196 meaning that the annual equivalent is 8196 kWh.

Seasons and months

The mapping of months to seasons in this category reflects the assumptions made in the source data, but is not intuitive. As such, this category's authority is set to recommended. An alternative assignment (with identical data) is available in this category.