Home Energy Analysis

The parent of HEAS was written more than ten years for a Victorian (Australia) government department. Interested local councils* signed up to have energy costs and consumptions reported for their buildings. In those primitive days there was ONLY ONE electricity supplier in the entire state and from memory, two gas suppliers. We arranged to have billing data downloaded for each of the buildings and constructed our database that way. Optional data for buildings included factors like floor area, number of occupants and building type.

From this data, and quite a lot of grunt work, we produced hundreds of pages of graphs and were able to nominate those buildings ripe for an energy audit. We reported both by building and by aggregate for a council. I can’t remember if we included water or whether we calculated carbon dioxide equivalents. I do remember that we had access to petrol consumption data for some groups and did some reporting based on that. Unfortunately my own sample copy has been misplaced.

HEAS represents my third attempt, in three computer languages, to put these features in place in a PC system suitable for individual households or businesses.  I still have plans to add number of occupants or floor area to extend the range of reports possible.

* local councils are the third and lowest level of government in Australia. Melbourne itself has the City of Melbourne representing the Central Business District and ten (that’s a guess) councils representing the suburbs.

The Home Energy Analysis System (HEAS) is Windows based software that maintains a database of electricity, gas and water usage for a household or business. Bills are entered when received, or from historical data if available. Simple mathematics is then used to generate graphs of consumption, cost and greenhouse gas equivalents. Splitting a bill period of say, three months, into weeks involves approximations and introduces inaccuracies. These can be reduced or eliminated by taking meter readings at shorter periods. www.countcarbon.com/water_ch.htm shows an example.

The sorts of people who I expect to be the main users of HEAS will be interested in their contribution to climate change. They will be acting to either reduce their use of energy, or changing energy sources to be less greenhouse intensive. They will need to be the type to retain their bills rather than throw them out after paying them. I’m an extreme example of this, having messy folders of bills that go back years.

You might surmise from this that I don’t expect HEAS to appeal to everybody, and that it probably won’t outsell Excel. So far, I’ve been correct.