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In Sunday’s post I’m going to be looking at how outside air temperature impacts your home’s energy consumption (mostly because of heating/air conditioning). In order to do that, I had to find history data on weather in my city. This was actually harder than I thought. Here’s how to do it in case you would like to do some detailed analysis on your home’s energy consumption.
1.) Go to WeatherUnderground.com
– This is actually a great resource for all weather related data
2.) At the very top of the page, type in your zip/city and state and and press Go.
- This will pull data from the weather station closest to your city. If you want to find weather data to a location closer to you, you have the option to choose this. The weather stations are usually located at airports.
3.) Scroll down a little bit until you see the “History and Almanac” section. Start it at the month you want to start getting data from (in my case I wanted to see data for the month of August) and click View.
4.) At the next page you will be taken to the “Daily Summary” page. Click on the tab for “Monthly Summary”.
5.) Scroll down to the bottom of the page and you will see the section “Daily Observations”.
There’s your data. At this point, you can copy the data and paste into excel to perform some more detailed analysis (just make sure to “paste special –> text”).
Now you have the data you will need to compare how your home’s energy consumption is impacted by the temperature outside. That will be my next blog! Seen here: Outside Temp and Energy Consumption.
Great info! Do you have any links, examples or resources regarding your excel file? I made one to track my monthly and avg daily kwh, and monthly h2o use, but I’d love to see what you’ve done.
Oh, it looks like that will be your next post – looking forward to it.
Jay, along with my post later I will give instructions on how I created the excel file. All pretty standard stuff but it did take me awhile remembering how to graph on two y axes.
Jay,
Here you go, let me know what you think!
http://blog.mapawatt.com/2009/09/13/outside-temp-energy-consumption/
Great post. Your blog is one of the most pertinent and useful I have seen.
this site is worthless to me. Either that or I can’t navigate it appropriately. When I click on weather records for 1983, the latest I can bet is 1996. Not good enouth. I’m looking for historical temperature records, and historical means older than 20 years.
Try your library.
HI Carol, As with all things. If there is a need, there is a service that provides it. The answer is almost never, NO but it is YES there is a price. The website weather-warehouse (dot) com seems to have lots of historical data going back quite a while.
For a price. I don’t know the price because I was looking for free information to satisfy my own curiosity.
Good luck with your search Carol.