What would be a great feature would be how much is your choices costing. If you change settings what is the cost difference? Best already tells you how long your ac or heat was running. Just add in your cost of electricity or gas. And provide the different times of your cost. Like summer time there is a different cost on high demands for electricity. Just put your cost in and it would calculate how much for that day or month. When you change settings it would help to see if you made a good choice or not.
Thanks for the idea! The tricky part of this is identifying how much power your equipment actually uses. I have runtime, and could collect electricity cost, but it’s all ultimately worthless unless I know how much power your equipment uses. This varies a lot and can even change depending on things like how dirty your air filter is.
I own a Sense, and the neat thing is that it’s actually able to do all this pretty effectively. The best beestat could do is guess…which has some value I suppose. I think a better route might be showing trends and highlighting when your equipment runs during peak hours so you can try to minimize that.
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Would there be a way to add info for equipment so we could see how much energy we are using without multiplying runtimes in a spreadsheet?
Possibly. Would you be able to share a bit more detail about what you’re trying to do? Any spreadsheets or graphs you’ve created will help me understand what you’re trying to achieve.
I suppose if you have a heat pump and know that it uses x kWh in Stage 1 and y kWh in Stage 2, you could input that to Beestat.
Beestat would be able to tell you how many kWh were used for each time it cycled on, and also sum up the kWh used for day/week/month/year in the history.
If you went deeper and allowed configuration of an electricity tariff rate, you could show how much that cost, too! Though this gets complex, fast… peak and offpeak time of use tariffs etc etc.
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I think trying to get cost with tariffs out of something like this is a tall ask and a bit of a rabbit hole. If you wanted to get approximate power consumption for a day that might be more reasonable.
Right now I’m tracking degree days for a heating system and graphing the total number of BTUs required per day then dividing it by the difference in average inside and outside temperatures. Then I graph the BTUs per degree delta per day so I can see any trends as changes are made. This is good for sizing equipment and seeing improvements with air sealing/ insulation upgrades.
So far I’ve just made a form for furnaces/electric heat as they’re the easiest but it would require a better form if you wanted to start graphing stuff like AC and heat pumps where outside temperature affects condenser performance.
Here’s an example of what I am doing right now for sizing a furnace and monitoring changes as I air seal and insulate a house.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fjU2pAR15msvara5McmiPDcvfq92w5qVuia9oCPIU9Q/edit?usp=sharing
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Merged this with an existing topic.
It would be cool to see an estimated fuel consumption over a period of time by providing my furnaces consumption rate. As someone who has to order oil every so often, this would be helpful.
Merged your post with an existing one as it’s right there in the same boat.
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I would like to see an option for Heat Pump run percentages for each stage of the heat pump.
I have 2 properties. One has a Heat Pump with electric Auxiliary Heat. One property has multiple Heat Pumps with Propane Auxiliary Heat.
Since I configure the change over temperature threshold for when the Heat Pump switches to Auxiliary Heat it would be useful to know what percentage during a month or chosen window State 1 vs State 2 (Auxiliary) heat was running. Also the total number of run time hours for each would be useful as this can be used for energy consumption calculations and so forth. It could help me estimate my Propane useage without being on the property so I could call for a refill.
Another stat that would be useful to calculate/tabulate run time for the systems. For example, I run my HVAC fans 95% of the time for recirculation and filtering. It would be nice to have a cumulative and a run time counter and possibly threshold alarm for filter replacement based on run hours.
It would also be helpful to have a cumulative as well as a run time counter for AC, Heat Pump and each stage of heating or cooling. Again to plan for maintenance, repair or replacement and to also compare overall seasonal system run times.
Most of what you’re looking for is (more-or-less) already in beestat.
The Thermosat Summary chart can be grouped by day, week, month, or year. I’m not showing percentages, but you can get total runtime and calculate percentages pretty easily:
Fan runtime will come to this chart eventually, but until then you can use the filter info (three dots on the Thermostat card on the main page > Filter Info)
If you’re technically proficient you could pretty easily connect to the beestat API and build something custom that takes all this data and does a few calculations for you to save a bit of time.
This might be a long shot (or perhaps a paid value-add feature): Importing of your specific Heat Pump Performance data vs temperature, as well as the cost of your electric. And perhaps data for gas furnaces and fuel costs for that, too. Then the Temperature Profiles graph could show a cost in $$/day for that specific heat source at that specific outside temperature. Or all the beestat graphs could show how much you spent that day on heating/cooling.
Hello, I am new here but have been using beestat.io for years. I recently replaced me furnace and went from 100K btu to 35/60k btu 2 stage. I was hoping I would be able to add the size of the equipment so I could better compare my usage to others.
Thank you
Cody
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Hi Cody. I moved your suggestion over here - make sure you hit that Vote button up top!
I think having this kind of data could be really powerful but I feel like it might fall short…it just depends on how many people actually know and enter this information in.
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Hi Cody, I’m in the same situation. A 2 stange non-modulating furnace.
I did download the runtime data and do the multiplication to compare to degree heating days. I was attempting to recreate the evaluation run by ACEEE (link below).
My furnace control is on a UPS to avoid voltage quality issues I was seeing in our new house, that has since been corrected by our grid operator. From that I can get the furance fan power draw from that, and assume the nameplate of the furnace is near what is actually being used.
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I was surprised to see how the study showed the gas usage to be the same. I have a pcm motor as well with the new furnace. So far on that low stage I find the longer run time make the house feel more even between rooms.
Some great comments I got from another user:
Our home is in on propane and we don’t have automatic refill service, as we prefer to call around for the best rates before filling. I know the furnace btu’s of input and I know the energy content for propane is ~91,500 btu/gallon. Most people also wouldn’t know how much they are spending on propane each day until the truck comes to refill the tank
Beestat shows me the runtimes, then I simply do the math to get the final number of gallons used each week or month. Or, I know that 10 hours of runtime is about equal to 12 gallons of propane for my scenario. It would be REALLY cool if you had the option to turn on one additional graph and enter the input btu’s rating for your particular furnace to see the usage in gallons (or Therms for natural gas - see below). I know all the math and how to see the end result (gallons used and/or $ spent each day/week/month on propane), but it takes some time and I’m not sure the average person knows how to determine how many gallons they are using each day.
Here are some numbers for my specific scenario…
The input label on our furnace says it consumes 110,000 btus (there is a nameplate with this data for every furnace). Since propane contains 91,500/gallon, our furnace uses 1.202 gallons/hour
If beestat shows a daily runtime of 5.5 hours, I just take 5.5 hours x 110,000 (my furnace) = 605,000 total btu. Then divide by 91,500 - which gives me a total of 6.61 gallons used that day. It would be really cool if the app could show gallons of propane usage per day! Most people on propane know what they pay per gallon, so I could take this number X the cost/gallon and quickly see the total cost
Not sure if beestat is setup for a user to enter data for your own device or not. Most of the existing beestat data is more automatic where everyone follows the same protocol. If you can’t setup a field to enter the btu, maybe a drop down with pre-populated choices. Most furnaces seem to be 30,000 btu to 150,000 btu range, which would be 13 fields if you go with intervals of 10,000 btu on a list of choices.
For people on natural gas, the billing would be setup as “Therms”. One therm is 100,000 btu. My same example with natural gas instead of propane would be as follows…
If beestat shows a daily runtime of 5.5 hours, I just take 5.5 hours x 110,000 (my furnace) = 605,000 total btu. Then divide by 100,000 btu - which gives me a total of 6.05 Therms used that day.
For anyone with Sense or Emporia Vue (which I have) there are unofficial APIs that could be used to bring in kWh data to Beestat so actual costs could be calculated and displayed.