“Energy Lens is definitely a time saver for me. It's easy to understand how it works. After two clicks on a spreadsheet with thousands of values, it takes me only five minutes to create the graphs and tables that I need. Without this program it would take me hours to do the same analysis.
My experience is that Energy Lens is an easy to learn and easy to use program that gives readable results in no time. With this add in for Excel, energy consumption analysis is made easy and fast.”
Per Atle Aanonsen University of Agder, Norway
Energy Monitoring Charts and Tables Created by Energy Lens
Using Energy Lens, you can instantly create a variety of charts and tables from interval energy data of your choosing. All charts and tables are created directly in Excel, meaning that they are easy to edit, or copy and paste into reports or presentations.
Although these charts and tables can be used for many kinds of energy analysis, they are particularly useful for the energy monitoring and targeting practiced by energy consultants and energy managers or facility managers.
You can very easily create the following charts and tables for yourself: just download Energy Lens and give it a go.
Calendar charts for an overview of energy consumption patterns
The "Calendar" feature is great for getting a quick view of the patterns of energy consumption. It plots an entire month of profiles on a single sheet:
Overlayed profiles
Each of the mini-charts shown above have maximum, average, and minimum profiles overlayed on top. You can leave these out of your calendar charts if you like, but, if you configure these overlayed profiles appropriately, you might find them useful for things like:
Spotting days or times with above-average energy consumption.
Comparing recent energy consumption with that of another period (e.g. the same month last year).
Using calendar charts to find energy waste
Calendar charts make it easy to spot the times when it's likely that energy is being wasted:
If you're new to energy-data analysis and you're not sure what to look for, you might like to set aside some time to go through our article on finding energy waste.
Anyway, once you've identified possible sources of waste, you can use the other features of Energy Lens to investigate further, quantify the waste, and set targets to ensure that it doesn't happen again.
Single-day profiles – detailed charts of energy usage
The "Single Day" feature allows you to view an individual date in more detail:
Just like with the "Calendar" charts, you can easily leave out the average, maximum, and minimum overlayed comparison data if you want your single-day charts to be as simple as possible.
More detailed data gives more detailed profiles
The chart above was generated from half-hourly data. If you have more detailed data, you'll get more detailed profiles, such as this profile of 15-minute data with optional overlays included. Energy Lens works with 5-minute, 10-minute, 15-minute, 20-minute, 30-minute (half-hourly), and 60-minute (hourly) interval data.
Using "Date Finder" to identify dates of interest
The "Single Day" feature has a "Date Finder" to help you identify dates of interest such as:
The date of maximum consumption.
Dates where consumption was above or below a certain threshold.
Saturdays or Sundays where consumption was above a certain threshold between 00:00 and 07:00. (You can actually specify any days-of-the-week or times-of-the-day, and you can optionally exclude specific dates such as bank holidays or shutdown periods.)
The "Av Max Min" feature helps you to make a bar-chart of the average, maximum, and minimum interval values between selected dates. Amongst other things, this can be useful for comparing the average, worst, and best energy performance of a building.
The profile above is based on 15-minute interval data from a manufacturing business. Each week, the business runs continuously from mid-morning on Monday to mid-afternoon on Friday, so, to give a good representation of the days with 24-hour operation, this av-max-min profile is based on data from Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays only.
The data in this chart specifically excludes the energy consumption on holiday days when the business was closed. In particular this prevents the average and minimum values from being affected by the low energy consumption on holiday days.
Energy Lens makes it very easy to focus on the specific dates that you choose – this is particularly important for meaningful average, maximum, and minimum profiles. Please feel free to download Energy Lens and try out its advanced date-selection features.
As a table of figures
You can also make a table showing the average, maximum, and minimum interval values between selected dates, and the specific dates on which the maximum and minimum values occurred:
Average, maximum and minimum tables such as these are useful for identifying dates on which consumption was at a maximum or minimum at particular times of the day.
The "Daily" feature helps you to make charts and tables of day-by-day demand (kW average power) or total energy consumption (kWh):
Choosing the times
You can easily choose to focus on particular times-of-the-day (e.g. to look at a particular tariff cost-band). For example, the above chart looks at energy consumption between 09:00 and 17:00 only, as these are the core occupancy hours of the building that the interval data came from.
Looking at longer periods of energy consumption
The "Daily" feature can be very useful for getting a quick, fairly detailed snapshot of energy consumption over a longer period of time. For example, the chart below shows 8 months worth of data:
This is great for pinpointing days when energy consumption was uncommonly high or low between your chosen times (you can use midnight to midnight if you want to look at complete days).
Including maximum and minimum kW
You might have noticed that the chart above includes daily maximum and minimum kW alongside the average values. A number of the features of Energy Lens give you the option of including these maximum and minimum kW in your charts and tables. This extra data can help you to get an idea of how the energy consumption varied within each day, and it is useful if you're looking for periods with an unusually high maximum demand (peak load).
Weekly and monthly charts and tables for larger energy-consumption trends
The "Weekly" and "Monthly" features make it easy to compare energy performance on a week-to-week or a month-to-month basis.
The sophistication of the "Weekly" and "Monthly" features is in the calculation of their figures. When tracking energy performance, it's very important that you follow some rules to ensure that the results are meaningful – the "Weekly" and "Monthly" features of Energy Lens make it easy to do this.
Although you can use the "Weekly" and "Monthly" features to look at overall changes, it's usually better to focus in on specific days-of-the-week and times-of-the-day. For example:
If you want to check your progress at reducing energy waste on weekends, you'll want to look at changes in the energy consumption on weekends only.
If you want to see if your new occupancy-sensing lights are working to reduce energy consumption at lunch times (when the office is empty), you'll want to look at the energy consumption on, say, Mondays to Fridays between 12:30 and 13:30 only.
Tracking changes in energy performance by focusing in on specific days and times is an incredibly effective energy-monitoring technique.
However, it is very time consuming to do without specialist software like Energy Lens.
The following chart is an example of how Energy Lens can help you to focus in on specific days and times – it looks at the average power on Tuesday evenings only:
Tuesday evenings are just an example – they might, for instance, be when the cleaners come in. Energy Lens makes it easy to focus in on any days and times, so you can choose the days and times that are relevant to your operations.
Comparing weekly or monthly maximum and minimum kW
Like the "Daily" feature, both the "Weekly" and "Monthly" features give you the option of looking at maximum and minimum power demand. For example, the chart below shows month-on-month variations in maximum, average, and minimum kW:
As tables of figures
The "Weekly" and "Monthly" features can also output Excel tables. Like the chart above, the table below was created to investigate month-to-month variations in weekend energy performance.
A table such as this provides a great starting point for your own calculations.
The "Summary" feature helps you to calculate figures such as totals, averages, maximums, and minimums, for the dates and times that you specify. For example, the summary table below has figures that were calculated for core occupancy hours only (09:00 to 17:00, Monday to Friday, excluding bank holidays):
Like the other tables that Energy Lens makes, one of the best things about summary tables is that you can use them as a starting point for your own calculations. All the tables that Energy Lens makes are just regular Excel tables, so you can easily chop and change them or extend them as you please. This alone makes Energy Lens quite different to most energy management software!
