Comparison homes subsets

[ixu]

Recent extensive discussion here:

I feel like my house is just a huge energy monster

Yes, its a complain, but not a rant, which I’ve been postponing to talk about far too long. We live in Quebec, Canada. Here winters are extreme and houses are mainly heated with electricity for that it is the cheapest in North America and is a very reliable heating system. In the “Trends” tab, there is the “Compare” card. The issue here is that this comparison is absolutely unfair because it takes into account all Sense users, which I believe are mostly in the southern region, who either are …

A few of the issues (talked about above to a certain extent):

• Homes can vary dramatically in size/insulation/aspect/exposure/shadowing etc. That alone is a large multi-dimensional dataset.

• A ground-source heat pump, for example, is a lot more efficient than electric baseboard heat so you need to compare similar heating/cooling “devices”, not just electric vs oil. This becomes multi-dimensional pretty quickly especially because many homes will have a mix of systems.

• A less obvious factor, somewhat based on the first two issues, is “what does compare really mean?”. Meaning: Let’s say you see that you are in the bottom 10% of usage. Great. But you have a GSHP so you should be. OK. Ignoring house size and whatnot, then your goal might be to get to the bottom 5% of usage whereas if you knew you had a big house (relatively) then you might be dis-incentivized to even try.

Takeaway: Compare only works when you define precisely what it means and defining that in sufficient detail in the Sense world is a task of similar scale to electrical device disaggregation!