The traditional way to compare buildings’ fuel consumptions is to use annual kWh per square metre. When they are in the same city, evaluated over the same interval, and just being compared with each other, there is no need for any normalisation. So it was with “Office S” and “Office T” which I recently evaluated. I found that Office S uses 65 kWh per square metre and Office T nearly double that. Part of the difference is that Office T is an older building; and it is open all day Saturday and Sunday morning, not just five days a week. But desktop analysis of consumption patterns showed that Office T also has considerable scope to reduce its demand through improved control settings.

Two techniques were used for the comparison. The first is to look at the relationship between weekly gas consumption and the weather (expressed as heating degree days).

The chart on the right shows the characteristic for Office S. Although not a perfect correlation, it exhibits a rational relationship.

Office T, by contrast, has a quite anomalous relationship which actually looked like two different behaviours, one high one during the heating season and another in milder weather.

The difference in the way the two heating systems behave can be seen by examining their half-hourly consumption patterns. These are shown below using ‘heat map’ visualisations for the period 3 September to 10 November, i.e., spanning the transition from summer to winter weather. In an energy heatmap each vertical stripe is one day, midnight to midnight GMT from top to bottom and each cell represents half an hour. First Office S. You can see its daytime load progressively becoming heavier as the heating season progresses:

Compare Office T, below. It has some low background consumption (for hot water) but note how, after its heating system is brought into service at about 09:00 on 3 October, it abruptly starts using fuel at similar levels every day:

Office T displays classic signs of mild-weather overheating, symptomatic of faulty heating control. It was no surprise to find that its heating system uses radiators with weather compensation and no local thermostatic control. In all likelihood the compensation slope has been set too shallow – a common and easily-rectified failing.

By the way, although it does not represent major energy waste, note how the hot water system evidently comes on at 3 in the morning and runs until after midnight seven days a week.

This case history showcases two of the advanced benchmarking techniques that will be covered in my lunchtime lecture in Birmingham on 23 February 2017 (click here for more details).