Consumption profiles are used in projects to keep track of the electricity use of your customer, so that we can see what sort of an impact solar PV will have. The consumption will vary depending on volumes of usage and seasonal (as well as daily) variations in energy use.
In PVsell, there are meter data consumption profiles and editable (trading/non-trading) consumption profiles. If you have your customer's interval metering data for an entire year, it will help you provide the most accurate assessment possible.
If your customer doesn't (yet) have interval metering data, an editable (trading/non-trading) consumption profile is a perfect solution.
You can create a new consumption profile or add a consumption profile from the library and edit the trading/non-trading data. We'll show here how to edit the consumption profile within a project.
Note that you can also edit the consumption profiles that exist within your libraries. The process is similar, but the starting point is the library rather than the project.
1. Open the project's 'Consumption' tab
2. Click 'Edit'
This way you open the editing screen for the consumption profile previously loaded to the project.
You can also click 'Load' to add another consumption profile to this project and modify it according to your customer's consumption patterns (How do I load a consumption profile to the project?).
If there is no consumption profile loaded in your project, you will see the 'New' button instead of the 'Edit' button, so you can create a new consumption profile from scratch: How do I add a new consumption profile to my project?
3. In the 'Edit Consumption Profile' window, select 'Editable' for the Consumption Profile Type
4. Edit the data
You have different methods to edit your consumption profile.
Remember that you need to edit the data for trading days separately from non-trading days. You can select which type of days you wish to edit in the table below from either 'trading' or 'non-trading'.
Choose any of the editing methods convenient for you:
You can specify the trading and non-trading information directly in your browser using a spreadsheet-like interface. Here you can edit each individual cell of the table to produce the consumption profile you desire.
In the 'Editing Method' field, select 'Web Edit' (set by default), and edit the data (for trading and non-trading days separately):
- edit individual data points,
- or copy and paste values (you can also paste values into this table from Microsoft Excel if you wish),
- or fill across or fill down.
You can perform visual editing of individual data points.
4.2.1. Change the 'Editing Method' to 'Visual Edit', and edit the consumption profile by dragging each node to a new value (for working and non-working days separately)
4.2.2. If you wish to restore the consumption profile (and cancel the edits you made), you can click 'Restore'
You can change the editing method to a third option to overwrite the currently loaded consumption profile from your own local .csv file.
Working/Non-working files must be in CSV format with a row of months along the top, and a column with an hour of day on the left. It must be in the same format as the Web Edit tables. You can also click the 'example data file' link preceding the upload sections to see what format these uploads must be in.
Note that the year/hour row/column can be in any format, or be blank, but must exist because they will be removed.
The first row of your CSV file must contain column headings.
4.3.1. Change the 'Editing Method' to 'Overwrite with CSV'
4.3.2. Upload your .csv consumption file for trading days ('Working File')
4.3.3. Upload your .csv consumption file for non-trading days ('Non Working File')
5. After editing the trading/non-trading data in the 'Edit Consumption Profile' window, click 'Save changes'
6. If necessary, consider other consumption profile adjustment options:
With trading/non-trading consumption profile types you have the ability to make coarse adjustments by selecting the number of days per week that the business operates.
6.1. Open the project's consumption tab
6.2. Select the operating days for your customer
- Select a standard 5 days a week (click '5'),
- or select a standard 7 days a week (click '7'),
- or select each day individually and choose AM or PM operational times (click 'Advanced').
You can also specify average consumption and scale the data to match your customer's overall consumption as listed on their bill. For example, you've loaded in a trading/non-trading consumption profile for a similar customer, so you need to scale your old customer's data to match very closely the total consumption of your new customer.
What is 'Average Daily Consumption' and when should I scale a consumption profile?
If you apply export limiting, any excess solar produced (outside of instant consumption) is dropped. Note that applying export limiting will affect PVsell output figures including solar production among other things.
0 Comments