@billsspammail, and all,
Just did a little playing with Excel. If you know how to use Pivot Tables, it’s pretty easy to conform Sense exported daily data to whatever billing cycle you are on.
Select all your exported daily data (probably the years worth to date), then start a Pivot Table with the following field setup. Set the Name filter to just the ‘Total Usage’ checkbox.
@kevin1, yes it isn’t difficult to get the two to align… outside of Sense, in a spreadsheet, as a one-off thing, but it completely misses the point of the request and in the larger sense this forum where we’re trying to help build a better Sense product… What we want, is for it to be easier for Sense to align with our bills out-of-the-box, and NOT to have to move numbers around outside of the apps.
This may be hard for those with never-changing meter read dates to understand, but this is in no way a trivial issue, I pulled out the utility names provided by posters in just this thread alone (keep in mind several people didn’t mention theirs specifically), and if you include my electric utility, Xcel Energy, which according to this site shows 3.6 million electric customers, we’re talking at least 3 out of the top 10 investor-owned utilities in the country, which combined, represent nearly 13 million customers, and it is pretty safe to assume that outside of PG&E, there are MANY more of us locked into utilities with admittedly stupid meter read practices for which the current “bill” functionality is simply not very useful.
@RyanAtSense as to how to deal with it, that’s a great question. I have no idea what my meter read date will actually be until after receiving my bill. I review and check the math for every bill and since I care a lot about accracy of data reports, I would be perfectly content to edit meter read dates after the fact to get Sense to align. Out of curiousity, I took the average day of the month for which my meter read date is and found it to be the 13th, but it could be anywhere from the 9th to the 17th in the two years history I examined. I know from speaking with an Xcel account rep, that they give themselves a “window” for which to read meters, and that is why this kind of thing happens. I don’t know how long PG&E has been on perfect calendar read dates, but I’d guess that they weren’t always doing this either, but that your public utilities commission may have forced them to because utilities are generally running out of excuses, but until other regulatory bodies across the country follow suit, this will continue to be an issue.
Readings of all meters used for determining charges to customers shall be made each month unless otherwise authorized by the commission upon petition by the utility. The term “month” for meter reading and billing purposes is the period between successive meter reading dates which shall be as nearly as practicable to 30-day intervals. When a utility is unable to gain access to a meter, it shall leave a meter-reading form for the customer.
A utility may permit the customer to supply meter readings on a form supplied by the utility, providing a utility representative reads the meter at least once every 12 months or at an interval determined upon petition to the commission and when there is a change in customers and when requested by the customer. This form should advise the customer of the utility’s responsibilities to read the meter.
If the billing period is longer or shorter than the normal billing period by more than five days, the bill shall be prorated on a daily basis.
That last clause is the key, utilities in MN are given a lot of flexibility with meter read date timing, and since they aren’t regulated to be precisely temporally consistent, they just won’t… one of the few impetuses they have is that if they’re outside more than 5-days it becomes a nightmare for their billing departments.
@aj.vandenberghe, I absolutely agree with you. ToU and other billing information should be baked-into the Sense costing mechanism eventually. My only disagreement is when users say it is an extremely easy feature to implement, and need the feature yesterday, but yet can’t be bothered to try via spreadsheet, when the base spreadsheet has been given to them… Strikes me that they are creating artificial urgency and are intellectually dishonest about it being so easy.
ps: Capturing all the possible billing data, let alone the associates calculations, is extremely hard. I have a pointer on another thread to the OpenEI database that has something like 55K rate plans for the US. I think PG&E alone had 750 or so. Many of the PG&E ones have expired, but that’s no guarantee all users are going to be off of them, due to waivers (I’m on a waiver right now). Plus many are commercial, but then again, I have seen a number of small businesses using Sense, so you can’t exclude many of those plans. Bottom line - I challenge any user who says “implementing rate plans is easy”, to even parse all the rates in .json database, and give a summary of how many different types of calculations are needed to accommodate all the residential plans. I’ll bet I get no takers (except maybe me)
@kevin1 I believe you are absolutely right in your assessment that many people massively underestimate the challenge presented with these issues. On the other hand, I couldn’t help but feel that the ubiquity of this specific issue was also being underestimated. I’m very surprised that this thread doesn’t have more hearts, I would have thought there would be higher demand for some alternative to the current setup.
@RyanAtSense how about this idea:
Under Settings > My Home > Billing Cycle Start users can either enter a day of month, as it presently allows, or toggle to another option: “Custom”.
If a user selects “Custom”, then when they go to the Trends > Usage > Bill view, they are shown two calendar buttons that allow them to quickly tap in a start and end date?
I can’t speak for other users, but for the majority of my purposes, this would be great for simply comparing quickly with any given bill they are looking at! Sure, swiping left and/or right on the “Custom Bill” toggle would require additional entry of two new dates (default when switching left or right would simply change the month to reduce the extra work by the user at least a little bit), but I think this would be a great first step toward helping those with irregular billing cycles.
Edit: @kevin1 lol I just now saw you suggested this same damn thing, my bad!
@aj.vandenberghe, no problem. I like the incremental approach. The whole costing thing is simple in principle - define the billing cycle, decorate the hours in the billing cycle with price tier tags, then compute, but the devil is in the details.
Define the billing cycle - I just saw @jitojo’s thread that implies two separate cycles to billing - the payment cycle and the yearly “net” banking cycle. So it’s no so simple as simple billing cycle sometimes.
Decorate the hours of the cycle with tier tags - Except that some tiers/grids don’t fall on hour boundaries, some are dynamically determined (brownout pricing periods), and some grids are complicated (PG&E applies the weekend grid to holidays as well - a different list of dates each year).
Compute the cost - But some things like tiered pricing doesn’t make for easy runtime calculation. Prices at the end of the billing period are higher than the beginning. But if you used less energy at the beginning, then prices would be lower now at the end.
The second and third steps can mostly be table driven for TOU - 24hour tier grids with grid selection logic and data, plus tariff tier pricing tables. An interesting design question is whether all tier grids have clean hourly and monthly breakpoints as the OpenEI rate database assumes. If so, that greatly simplifies the design.
I wish there was a 5th option under trend for custom date range. My billing date appears random and is not a set day of the month. Would be nice to be able to easily compare bills to sense without having to export and manipulate the data
