Entering fuel usage in yearly chunks

[John]

Thought it might be helpful to create this thread.

Obviously we would all love month to month breakdowns of fuel usage, but at least down here away from Natural Gas country, it is extremely rare to get that kind of granular information.

Can someone tell me, based on the following information, exactly to enter this information into Optimiser? Specifically the date range piece, because that seems to be the most important. I must be doing something wrong, because I can’t get anything to appear on my graphs, etc.

Customer says “I used 850 gallons last year, 760 the year before, and 802 the year before that.” I also burned about 4 cords of wood.

Any help would be appreciated.

[John]

Attached a screen shot of bulk data point and electrical graph. Is there supposed to just be one dot?

But it doesn’t seem to be able to load. Can it handle a .tiff file?

[Gamaliel Lodge]

Hi John,

To handle your situation, you need to use the Multiple Fuel selection in the Fuel Type control on the Utilities screen. On the Multiple Fuels popup, you pick a date range that covers the year(s) for which you have complete date for every fuel. You can enter individual delivery receipts in the table, if you want, or just scroll to the bottom and enter the totals.

It’s not clear to me if the 4 cords of wood in your example covers all three years or is just for the previous year. Assuming that is just the previous year, then you would enter a date range that covers all of the last heating season (e.g. 1/7/2013 – 1/7/2014) and then 850 gallons for the liquid fuel and 4 chords for the wood.

You charts were most likely not showing anything due to an error that we have just corrected. Look out for an email with more details and instructions on how to restore the charts.

I’m not sure what the problem is with the attachments, but another OptiMiser technician should be able to help.

[Ryan Moore]

Seems to be the case that the forum doesn’t handle .tiff files. I’ll see if there’s a fix, but in the mean time is there any way you can convert it locally and send it up in a different format? Thanks!

[John]

Here’s the chart I get – in PDF form…

[John]

Additionally I think #2 Fuel oil is a pretty unique (but super common) fuel type in VT. Getting granular (monthly) fuel usage is really hard. Sure, there may be some folks that have a scheduled delivery every month and there tank gets topped off every time. However, it’s must more common (at least here in the southern part of the state) for folks to just “put a couple hundred bucks worth in the tank.” Since it’s not getting filled, then it’s not telling us how much fuel was used – in much the same way that only putting $20 worth of gas in your car won’t tell you how many MPG your car is getting. So really in most cases, annual usage is all we get. I’ve never had a digital read-out of fuel usage, ever – so the scrape tool is not something I would ever use. So I need to know how to enter in annual fuel usage for #2 Heating Oil, and I know a huge percentage of my fellow auditors are in the same boat. That’s the data we have for 75% of our audits.

Based on the responses above, it sounds like if the electrical data auto-populates from EVT then whatever fuel usage we enter in has to match those dates. Does it need to match exactly?

Thanks for the help so far. I’m slowly feeling more optimistic…

[Gamaliel Lodge]

John – There is no need for the fuel dates to match the electric dates. If you only have one fuel and you are using the main interface, you simply need to change the Start Date Bill 1 and End Bill 1 to cover the heating season that matches your data. If you have multiple fuels, then you follow the steps I described earlier.

[John]

I understand that an annual number is NOT ideal. But what if we have 3 years of annual usage (or more)? Wouldn’t that be better than just one? Can we put that in under multiple fuels somehow?

[Gamaliel Lodge]

Yes, as long as you have complete data fro all heating sources over that 3 year period, you can set the range to cover 3 years. However, if there is significant electric heat, then it would be better to stick to the same span as the electric bills at this time.

I would like to make it possible to run a separate heating analysis for the electric bills, which would lift that restriction. However at this time the utility heating analysis has to run all heating sources together.

[John]

So here is the latest chart after the updates… It is now showing that there is fuel use every month, but there is no variation… Its showing heating loads in the Summer? What did I do wrong?

Did I pick the most complicated project ever or what?

[Author]

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