Sunday, March 13, 2016

One year (almost) of energy use data from our new SuperGreen home

Below is a chart summarizing actual month energy use data for the last year from our new SuperGreen Laneway Home in downtown Whitehorse.  This home is rated as an EnerGuide for Homes rating of 89--just about the highest so far for the Yukon.

The graph shows in blue total actual energy use (electricity because the home is electrically heated too) and in red is the predicted energy use from the energy model created when the house was planned and built.

Since winter 2015-16 has been unusually warm I've "normalized" the actual energy use data to average winter conditions.  That way it takes out the effect of a warm winter.

Also I've adjusted the modeled energy use data for one occupant.  The "standard" conditions used in the EnerGuide rating assume a family of four.  So, I took that out of the model to better compare apples-to-apples.


What this shows is this house too is performing better than expected.  Overall, it has used 19% less energy than the model predicted.  This is a similar result to our SuperGreen duplex built in 2011 that uses about 30% less than predicted.

A few interesting things in the graph for 704B Wood St above.  You can see energy use "spike" in November and February.  In both of those months the garage was heated and "occupied".  In November my friend used the garage for about two weeks as a framing shop; and then in February Georgi and her friends setup a pop-up craft shop for a week.

I was worried this house was using more energy than predicted, but now that I see all the numbers in, I'm pretty happy with the results.