Where to get your data and what to ask for?

Do you pay an electric bill every month?
Do you have an electric meter on your house?

Well, then we know the utility company is monitoring your electrical usage, but how do you get that data? Before we get into where to find your data, let’s take a minute to talk about what exactly you are looking for. Whether you are a homeowner looking at your data for the first time, or an Engineer analyzing an existing building’s consumption, I would suggest using this comprehensive list of items and questions to make sure you have everything you need before getting started. Some questions just require a “yes” or “no” answer, if more information is needed then I will specify. Collecting your data can sometimes be a pain in the butt so I want to make sure you don’t have to backtrack later. It doesn’t matter whether you are in an apartment, a single resident house, a skyrise in NYC, or data center facility that contains no people, this comprehensive list will help make sure to check all the boxes when collecting your data.

First, let's determine whether you will need more than your meter data:

1. Is there solar onsite or any other piece of equipment generating power? If yes, you will need to collect the same type (hourly or 15 minute) and time period of data. Click here to learn more about your solar data. Click here to learn how to convert the type of data.

2. Is the building or city participating in a Community Choice Aggregator (CCA)? This will also be located on the utility bill. If yes, you will also need to look up the rate the building is associated with on the CCA.

That should be all the additional data you need when analyzing your building’s consumption profile. Let’s move forward with how to find the electric meter data.

Steps for Collecting Electrical Meter Usage & Billing Data

1. What is the date range of the data you need?

One Year worth of data is typically good enough. You’ll want some months in the summer and winter to account for both heating and cooling months as well as different schedules, such as no school in the summer time or the winter holidays.

COVID Affects on Data

One newer, yet very important factor affecting the entire world is the time over the COVID Year. Many building profiles have changed because occupancy and how we used buildings changed. So let’s ask a few more questions before determining the date range you need. Are you aware of any occupancy changes in the building during COVID? For example:

Did you go to an office before COVID and now work from home full time?
Are you analyzing a hospital where there were huge influx of patients?
Are you analyzing an office building that was shut down over COVID?
Are you analyzing a critical city building, like a Police Station that runs 24/7 and never shut down? This means there would be no affect due to COVID, but it's still important to note.

You can probably tell just from this list how big of an impact COVID had on our consumption as a society. We are still changing and it has been interesting to see how we continue to evolve, more on that later.

Questions on how the building may operate in the future:

Are you aware of any future occupancy change in the building that are approaching?
If you are working from home full time, are you expected to go back into the office eventually?
Something like a hospital Unless you are familiar with OSHPD regulations, I would get additional help with your building profile.
Is the office building planning to open 100% or are they allowing some people to continue to work from home?
Unrelated to COVID, maybe the building had something else planned in their schedule that you should include in your analysis.

Though we can’t collect data for the future these changes are important to consider when estimating savings measures.

Phew…first question, a little more complicated than it seemed. That’s okay, stay with me. Remember I said previously, this is a comprehensive list. We are building a foundation to make analysis simpler later.

I am also building up to say, make sure to at least collect the year before COVID if you are analyzing a building that was affected by occupancy changes. In the US, we closed down in March 2020, so collect March 2019 to March 2020, to compare your building consumption before COVID.

Okay, date range noted!

Remember to keep the date range consistent with all the data you collect, i.e. solar.

2. Collect Interval Data

Your usage is measured in $kW$ and/or $kWh$ and is measured in intervals. Depending on the utility company and the type of meter you have will depend on how frequently your usage is measured. Typical intervals are hourly, half hour, or 15 minute.

What is a kW and kWh?

3. Collect copies of the bills associated with the interval data range you selected

If you have a login online, you can often download PDF version of your bills.

This will give you the actual amount of power, energy, and dollars paid each month to the utility company as well as a few other key pieces of information.

4. Collect Billing History Data

Sometimes utility companies have your bill amounts in Excel formats (cvs. or xlsx.) as well. This will make analysis simpler later. You won’t have to copy values from the PDFs. The PDFs are still important to have because other information is provided on them like rates or other participating programs. They also come in handy to compare against other received data to check for accuracy since the bills determine the final payment.

5. Take note of what the utility rate is.

This will be located on the bill and is usually some funny combination of letters and numbers. The rate is how the utility company is charging you. On the utility company’s website you should be able to find the rate details of how dollars are calculated from consumption and demand.

Great! You made it through the list and know what you need. Let’s collect that meter data!

Collecting your Electrical Meter Data

First, if you pay your bills online, log into your account. If you live in one of the major cities in the United States you may be lucky and see a big green button, called “Green Button”. This is a program more and more utility providers are joining to make accessing data easier. Click this button, input the time period you want to analyze, and voila you have your data!

If you do not see this button, it may be a little more difficult and it varies from company to company. Begin by looking for the obvious like “Click here to download my data” but often times it’s not that blatant, here are some examples I’ve seen:

“My Data”

“Data Sharing”

“Data Request”

“Energy Manager”

“Energy Tool”

“My Usage”

“Analyze My Consumption”

If you have determined that there is no data to be found online, don’t fret! You just need to give your utility company a phone call. Before calling, have the list below handy.

Check List for Calling Utility Company for Data Request

Hopefully, this has helped you obtain your data! Let me know below if you have any questions, issues, suggestions for the article, or just to say hi!

Do you pay an electric bill every month?Do you have an electric meter on your house?