Entering Bill Data
Ryan Moore
Last Update 2 jaar geleden
Entering Utility Bills Manually
Heat Source: Indicate whether heat is provided through fuel, electricity, or both. Check Auto if you are unsure, and OptiMiser will detect which option provides the strongest signal in the bills. This can be useful for detecting significant use of portable electric heaters.
Auto Outlier: When this box is checked, OptiMiser detects bills that are statistical outliers and checks the Omit box next to the bill. This is good for detecting vacations or other anomalous usage patterns. It's always a good idea to double check the resulting omissions and review them with the homeowner, if possible.
Optimize Dates: Check this box, when you do not have exact meter read dates (e.g the utility company provided only month and year for each usage). OptiMiser will analyze billing dates between the 1rst and 28th of the month and select the best fit to weather date. Note: If the actual meter read dates are near the beginning of the month, then the utility company may report the usages as belonging to the previous month (i.e. a bill with Feb 3 read date is reported as the January bill). If the date optimization does not produce good results, you may want to move the initial bill date to the next month and try again.
Cooling System: Uncheck this box, if there is no cooling load in the electric bills.
No Baseload: Check this box, if an energy source is used for only heating/cooling.
Enter the Start Date Bill 1 and Fuel Type: The Start Date Bill 1 marks the beginning of the first billing period and would usually be the date of the prior meter reading. The dates will automatically propagate to 12 monthly periods, but can be easily changed. Starting date of the first bill period. Dates must be entered chronologically.
A check box “Use Fuel Date” on the Electric side will cause these same dates to be used for electric bills. If any date is altered, the label color will change to black and the date will no longer be automatically changed. Whenever the user changes the Start Bill Date 1, a message will offer them the choice of resetting all dates to new monthly periods and restoring the ability to automatically change dates to be in sequence.
End Bill date: Each date is the ending date of period which started with previous date.
Usage: The usage entered on a row should be the usage during the period which ends on the date on the row.
Omit: Check this box to mark missing or abnormal bills (e.g. unusually low usage during vacation). These bill periods will be excluded from the analysis. OptiMiser will try to detect unusual bills automatically, if you check the Auto Outlier box.
Estimated: Check this box for metered fuels where the meter was not read by the utility company during that bill period, for fuel deliveries that did not result in a take top-off, or any other situation where the usage entered may not reflect actual usage between the bill dates.
Note: OptiMiser cannot preform analysis if all bills are estimated because it will be impossible to determine an exact weather period to match to the bills. However, if you have complete records covering at least one year, you may mark the final bill as not estimated. The error introduced by this assumption will be small over a complete year of usage.
Delivered / Non-metered Fuel: The most important thing when entering usage for a non-metered fuel is to identify date ranges where the actual usage is known. If every fuel delivery results in the tank being topped-off, then each delivery amount will exactly match the usage since the the previous delivery. In this case, simply enter the delivery dates and amounts in successive controls on the Utilities tab, exactly as you would with a metered fuel. (Be sure to put a date in Start Date Bill 1 that represents the beginning of the usage period for the first bill.) If some of the deliveries do not result in a tank top-off, then do not enter those as individual utility bills, but rather roll those deliveries forward until the next top-off. Thus on every top-off date, report the sum of all deliveries since the last top-off. If the tank is never topped-off, then attempt to sum the usage for an entire season an enter it as one bill with a period covering the entire season.