Customise a Customer's Electricity Usage

This article is in the individual Projects section of OpenSolar. Once you've navigated to the Projects page, click the specific project you would like to edit. 

Electricity Usage

This section of the Project Page gives you the option to tailor the customer’s electricity usage data so their proposal is as accurate possible.

To do this, scroll down and click the edit button in the top right section of Electricity Usage.

First, choose your data source. Your Options are: 

OpenSolar supports Hourly Interval data which is accepted as 8760 hourly kWh values:OpenSolar has estimates (Low, Medium or High) you can use if you don't have any consumption data. You can also enter  known usage values on various timescales.  

• Starting from Jan 1st
• Copy Paste from an excel sheet with 24 columns (hours in a day) x 365 rows (days in the year)
• See the the article How to Enter Hourly Interval Data

You also have the option to enter in $ values from your customer's electricity bill to automatically calculate their usage. This can be done on a monthly, quarterly or annual bill basis. 

Note: When entering in Monthly or Quarterly values, you do not need to fill in all of the values, you can fill in only the ones you know and the total yearly will be calculated based on those.

Next you will have the option to set the Weekday and Weekend usage curves. You can do this by clicking on the Weekday/Weekend Usage Curve boxes and selecting the option from the drop-down. If none are chosen it will default to evening peak.

You also have the ability to scale the Weekend energy usage relative to the weekday usage. If, for example, 10% more energy is used on the weekend, you can enter in 1.1 in this box. If 50% more energy, 1.5.

Finally, if there are any controlled loads that are implemented in the household (such as a water heater) then you can enter in the daily usage (in kWh) of up to 3 in each of the boxes labelled Controlled Load 1/2/3 Daily Usage.

After you have made your changes to this section, ensure that you click the  button.