As awareness of the importance of good energy management increases – given not only environmental consequences but the impact on your bottom line, more and more businesses are turning to regular analysis of their energy usage. However, this can be time consuming, and comes as many companies face more pressing challenges following a turbulent year. Our ‘Report definitions’ tool allows you to generate your own automated monthly reports, which following set up can be issued internally to team members, to your clients, or to yourself on a regular basis with no further intervention required. This simplifies the task of energy management by providing you with easy visibility of how your site(s) are performing without the need to dive into mammoth spreadsheets or perform fiddly manual analysis.
Table of contents:
1. What reports are available: a summary
2. Report definition basics: Where to find Report definitions in your Wattics dashboard and how it works
3. Trend Analysis
4. Trend Analysis & Compare Chart
5. Active Power & Weekdays
6. Heatmap & operations analyser
7. Operations Analyser & Weekdays
8. Top 3 Consuming Areas
9. Top 3 Consuming Sub-areas
10. Deployment
11. Energy Performance
12. Utility Bill
13. Sentinel Report
14. CO2 Report
15. Power Quality Report
16. Daily Sentinel Report
17. White label report
*You should have Admin rights for managing reports. If you require access, please request this from the administrators associated with your Wattics account. You can request that the reporting feature be enabled in your dashboard. Note: If the reports feature is enabled in your dashboard as a non-admin user, the reports will only be visible to you and cannot be associated with another user: only users with admin privileges can associate reports to multiple users.
1- What reports are available: A Summary
| Report | What's in it? | What's it useful for? |
|---|---|---|
| Trend analysis | Monthly consumption vs. previous and same month previous year. % differences included. | At a glance visibility of performance and any anomalies |
| Trend analysis & compare chart | As above, though year-to-date usage figures are provided | Tracking your performance against an annual target |
| Active Power & weekdays | Load demand variations over a month. Max/min are identified | Rectifying problems with your electrical equipment before they cause a problem |
| Heatmap & operations analyser | Visual overview of your monthly consumption | Fastest way of scanning through a month of your data |
| Operations analyser & weekdays | Operations analyser & weekdays Breakdown of consumption and cost during weekdays/ weekends | Evaluating current operations for efficiency improvements |
| Top 3 consuming areas | Cumulated consumption of your biggest three consumers | A simple way to target easy energy savings |
| Top 3 consuming sub-areas | Cumulated consumption at appliance level for the top three consuming meters | Investigating differences in operation because of staff, shifts or the type of processing that is taking place at certain times |
| Deployment | Shows which points are monitored with physical meters and/or virtual meters at each level of your organisation tree | Identifying areas where there is potential for additional sub-metering, or creation of virtual meters |
| Energy Performance | Shows energy data in relation to a set KPI | Establishing whether a relationship exists between consumption and a corresponding KPI metric |
| Utility Bill | Build your own utility bill and customise to your specifications | Managing tenant sub-metering |
| Sentinel Report | Shows the total number of events that have occured for each monitored point displaying the cost due to an event being above or below normal | Providing insight into characteristic usage for a particular meter over the course of a month |
| CO2 Report | Understand how you are performing against your annual kgCO2 consumption target month on month | Monitoring carbon emissions targets: internal emissions goals, carbon legislation etc |
| Power Report | Shows Active, Reactive and Apparent Power; Power Factor; RMS Voltage; and RMS Current for a particular day | Understanding when peak demand occurs and how this changes over a month; maintaining a stable voltage profiles; identifying when equipment needs rebalancing |
| Daily Sentinel Report | Receive daily notifications about whether your monitored facilities have fallen out of line with expected consumption | Gaining insight into characteristic usage for a particular meter over the course of a day |
2- Report definitions basics: Where to find Report definitions in your Wattics dashboard and how it works
Log in to the dashboard and click on ‘Admin’ in the top left menu, then click on the ‘Reports’’ icon on the top right corner to access the report management page:
You can now begin putting together the specific information to configure your report (Fig. 3):
- Report Name: The name of your report
- Description: A short description with keywords to quickly find your report later on
- Energy type: Electricity/Gas/Water/Other readings
- Frequency: This is set to ‘Monthly’ by default
- Transmission day: Day of the month when the report should be sent
- Time shift in months: The time shift in months between the transmission month and the data period to be considered. For example, a value of 1 means that the March report will use data from February; 2 means that the March report will use data from January.
- Sites to be reported: Choose whether the report encompasses all the sites associated with the users’ dashboard, or selected sites only
- The report will now be created for each site active within the users’ dashboard and sent to them by e-mail every month based on your settings
There are 14 pre-built templates you can choose from, with this number constantly growing. You can select multiple pages by clicking on the tick box on the left as shown in (fig 4) below:
You can preview the pages and read the descriptions to decide which page to add to your report by clicking on the thumbnail (Fig.5):
3- Trend Analysis
i. What’s in this report?
The Trend Analysis report shows the target month’s consumption compared with the previous month and same month in the previous year. Consumption is provided in kWh and cost with % differences pre-calculated for you. It also shows the breakdown value consumption per weekday for the month.
ii. What’s this report useful for?
It gives you at a glance visibility of whether your site is operating as it typically does and quantifies this variation. The Daily Consumption chart included in this page also allows to quickly scan your eye over daily values to spot anomalous usage eg. Excessive consumption on Saturdays/Sundays when your site is not operational on weekends. If you are pursuing reduced usage compared to the previous year, this report also allows you to keep an eye on this performance from month to month.
Any significant deviations or concerning activity can be investigated in more detail by jumping into your Wattics dashboard – but if values are satisfactory you can simply close down the report and move on with your day; or perhaps send out a quick good news email to your team, if you’ve achieved your reduced consumption target.
–> View sample ‘Trend analysis’ report here
4- Trend Analysis & Compare Chart
i. What’s in this report?
The Trend Analysis & Compare chart again shows the month consumption, compared with the previous month and same month the previous year with % differences included. In addition, you are provided with figures for your year-to-date usage in kWh and cost, and a view of your average daily/monthly consumption for the target month. There are three charts available in this report providing further visualisations of your data. These look in more detail at your daily consumption over the course of the target month, track your monthly consumption against the previous year up to the current month (Fig. 6), and provide a high level overview of your monthly consumption against the previous month and the same month the previous year.
ii. What’s this report useful for?
While containing all the information available in the report above (Trend Analysis), here you have a broader overview of your cumulative performance to date, which is useful if you are tracking your performance against an annual target. With this information you can get a quick view of whether your site is looking to exceed its annual goal and whether you need to address – or potentially recalibrate, your operations to have a better chance of meeting your target.
You can also reference your target month consumption against the average to date, which will give you insight into where usage sits for a site compared to typical performance over previous months. Again this gives you an indication of whether or not some deeper analysis is required.
–> View sample ‘Trend analysis & compare’ report here
5- Active Power and Weekdays
i. What’s in this report?
The Active Power & Weekdays report shows the load demand variations over the month with maximum and minimum active power identified within a 5min window. You also see a breakdown of consumption for each particular day over the course of the month, and the overall proportion of consumption associated with each individual day over the course of a month.
ii. What’s this report useful for?
This view allows you to check the operations within a specific area, or of a particular set of equipment eg. boilers, HVAC, refrigeration, freezers, pumps. If power readings are unusually low or excessive at any point, this gives you an indication that equipment is not functioning correctly and affords you the time to rectify problems before they start posing a real issue for your business. You can, for example, immediately investigate your refrigeration units if you notice they are underperforming – avoiding the potential costs of spoiled food; you can decide to immediately shut down certain equipment if you think it presents a risk to your operations; and help prevent problems – if active power seems unusual on your HVAC pumps, for example, you can investigate the issue before a potential leak causes damage to the surrounding plant.
–> View sample ‘Active power & weekdays’ report here
6- Heatmap & Operations Analyser
i. What’s in this report?
The Heatmap & Operations Analyser report shows an overview of your monthly usage intensity via a heatmap: the darker the shade of green, the more intensive your energy usage. You can also see wastage analysis i.e. energy intensity of any monitored area or piece of equipment throughout the target month, or months to date.
ii. What’s this report useful for?
As you quickly become used to reading these heatmaps, this will provide you with perhaps the fastest way of scanning through a month’s worth of data to identify gross anomalies in your performance. If, for example, you are a business that operates only during weekdays, unexpected activity during weekends will jump out at you in an instant, as will any out-of-hours consumption at other times. This allows you to sound the alarm for further investigation on specific dates, as well as half-hourly time intervals.
–>View sample ‘Heatmap & operations analyser’ report here
7- Operations Analyser & Weekdays
i. What’s in this report?
Shows consumption per weekday and breakdown of consumption and cost during workdays/weekends for the target month and months to date. It also compares the weekend costs for the target month against the previous month, and provides an estimate for total costs expected at year end based on performance to date.
ii. What’s this report useful for?
This report is key when evaluating current operations for efficiency improvements. In cases where a site is operational on weekdays but not weekends, this page can help you keep track of whether the ratio split of consumption is broadly consistent, or whether it fluctuates, in which case it can be interrogated. If the share of weekend consumption rises dramatically, what shut down protocols were perhaps not observed at the end of the working week? Equally, if a month posts a particularly low proportion of consumption, is this because weekday consumption was higher than normal, or what took place to more efficiently bring down weekend consumption?
–> View sample ‘Operations analyser & weekdays’ report here
8- Top 3 Consuming Areas
i. What’s in this report?
The Top 3 Consuming Areas report shows your cumulated consumption per consumer, homing in on the top 3 consumers in terms of consumption and cost. The report also informs you of the % difference between last month’s consumption and usage during the corresponding month the previous year. You can also review the total consumption for the top consumers so far for the year and charts display daily consumption for the target month.
ii. What’s this report useful for?
This report is especially useful for you if you have multiple monitored areas broken out within your menu tree. In a hotel, for example, this could be chillers, HVAC, lifts, a ballroom, kitchens etc; a manufacturer engaged in the production of potatoes might have a cascade plant, compressors, production lines, store rooms separated out. Once you have identified your top 3 consuming areas, this presents a simple way to target easy energy savings by looking at solutions specific to those areas. In the case of the potato chips manufacturer, we could look at the working times of the cascade plant: Is equipment efficiently ramped down when the site is not operational? Is this consistent between days? Can we shift operations out of the costliest red tariff period? Since this might constitute the largest consuming part of the overall site, even small changes here will deliver swift dividends.
–> View sample ‘Top 3 consuming sites’ report here
9- Top 3 Consuming Sub-Areas
i. What’s in this report?
The next report, the Top 3 Consuming Sub-Areas show top consumers of energy at appliance level for the top 3 consuming meters. It presents you with much of the same kind of information as the previous report, although it does provide you with more granular insight into what individual pieces of equipment are doing within their area.
ii. What’s this report useful for?
In the case of a hotel, this allows us to dive into the sub-meters feeding the HVAC system, so this could be AHUs, air compressors, boilers etc; in the kitchens this could be extraction fans, lighting or heating. The potato manufacturer may have multiple compressors and production lines, and with this report gain specific insight into whether one of their compressors is displaying excessive activity, or if one production line is consuming far more energy than another – allowing investigation into differences in operation because of staff, shifts or the type of processing that is taking place at certain times.
–> View sample ‘Top 3 consuming sub-areas’ report here
10- Deployment
i. What’s in this report?
The Deployment report presents a table depicting which points are monitored with physical meters and others with virtual meters at each level of your organisation hierarchy. A Site indicates a building, or individual point, that sits within your Organisation – which in turn represents the highest level entity.
ii. What’s this report useful for?
This report can be useful for identifying areas where there is potential for additional sub-metering, or building virtual meters to provide more granular insight into how individual appliances, or pieces of equipment are performing. For example, if you find that your food compressors are defined as one area, you may wish to look at rolling out sub-meters to monitor these as separate entities.
–> View sample ‘Deployment’ report here
11- Energy Performance
i. What’s in this report?
The Energy Performance report shows the data points in the dashboard that have KPIs applied for reporting. This sample report (Fig. 10) shows daily consumption in relation to production data for the target month, although a variety of KPIs could be applied specific to your organisation. You can view this data either as a bar chart with the KPI reflected in the overlaid line, or as bars alongside each other.
ii. What’s this report useful for?
This report lets you easily see whether there is a relationship between the amount of energy usage at your site and a corresponding KPI eg. production. In this instance we can see that the overlying production spline does not correlate with changes in consumption suggesting a poor relationship between these metrics. This means that these production values are an unreliable predictor of energy consumed at this site. Since we are looking at a hotel here, perhaps it would be more useful to consider room occupancy, restaurant covers, or heating/cooling degree days as a KPI.
–> View sample ‘Energy performance’ report here
12- Utility Bill
i. What’s in this report?
The Utility Bill is a report that resembles a utility bill sent out by energy suppliers, which you can customise with information such as amount paid, amount outstanding or due, tax name and percentage, and cost per meter etc. You can add comments to the bill and customise it further by adding information and costs related to peak demand and/or other services rendered. Wattics supports three types of demand charges. It can be peak demand for kW and peak demand for kVA and you can choose to present it in 15 or 30 minute intervals on your bill. There are additional dropdown options which provide you with flexibility as to how energy supply services are charged. You can use kWh with a specific time range for time-of-use tariffs or select dashboard tariffs to calculate costs from the tariffs that are already set up in your dashboard.
ii. What’s this report useful for?
Cost per meter is especially helpful for managing sub-metering, as where you have a multi-tenant building, you can send a bill with the exact cost breakdown per tenant/apartment. For example, you may have a charge for the smart meter lease and daily refuse collection, which you can enter into the report. You can also add a personalised header and footer to your bill and select the clients you would like to send the report to.
–> View sample ‘Utility bill’ report here
13- Sentinel Report
i. What’s in this report?
The Sentinel report, shows the total number of machine-learning-powered events that have occurred for each monitored point displaying the cost due to an event being above or below normal, as well as the difference between the two. Cost difference is displayed in green if it is a saving, and displayed as red if it is an expense.
ii. What’s this report useful for?
Our ‘Sentinel Report’ gives insight into characteristic usage for a particular meter over the course of a month. It goes beyond mere consumption tracking to consider what expected usage is for a data point at a particular time based on historical performance. This generates a ‘bandwidth’ with activity outside of this considered anomalous. With this information you can precisely target and quantify unusual activity enabling you to achieve energy and cost savings. A hotel manager can interrogate differences in activity between shifts: What did the front of house team working the night shift on Monday do differently to the team the previous Monday to cause usage outside of typical range in the lobby? Another major use of this report is allowing continuity of monitoring. Regardless of staff or management changes, it is known how a particular area should be performing, so any incoming team knows what typical activity looks like – effectively providing you with a reliable and constant KPI.
–> View sample ‘Sentinel Report’ here
14- CO2 Report
i. What’s in this report?
This report shows kgCO2 for the target month at site level compared against the previous month, and the corresponding month the previous year with % changes indicated. The chart shows you a daily emissions average for the target month and the previous month – and then the difference between the two months. You can also view your annual kgCO2 consumption target to understand how you are performing against this, as well as how you are looking year-to-date compared to the previous year.
Image credit: CO2 Living
ii. What’s this report useful for?
In addition to energy usage and associated costs, many companies are becoming more concerned about monitoring carbon emissions whether as part of annual environmental targets, or to support reporting for various carbon compliance legislation requirements eg. Streamlined Energy & Carbon Reporting (SECR) in the UK. Having a direct monthly overview of carbon output provides a simple way to regularly check whether you are on track to keep within your annual threshold and allows you to adjust your monthly targets if it looks as though you are on course to overshoot.
–> View sample ‘CO2 Report’ here
15- Power Quality Report
i. What’s in this report?
This report shows you your Active, Reactive and Apparent Power; Power Factor; RMS (Root-mean-square – or Effective) Voltage; and RMS (Root-mean-square – or Effective) Current for a particular day. One meter point is displayed per page and a one hour average is provided.
- Active Power reflects power which is actually consumed in an AC Circuit measured in kW
- Reactive power is the power which flows backwards and forwards i.e. it moves in either direction in the circuit and is measured in kVAR
- Apparent Power is the product of the RMS value of voltage and current measured in kVA
ii. What’s this report useful for?
Having an insight into your Active and Apparent Power allows you to understand when peak demand occurs; how this changes from day to day, week to week, or over the course of a month. If power is stable throughout the month before suddenly peaking, you can investigate the reasons behind this. This is particularly useful in industrial, manufacturing and large commercial building settings.
Reactive Power performance is important for stable voltage in an electrical network, as disturbances can have an impact on the performance of electrical equipment, motors etc. Excess Reactive Power can lower the operational efficiency of your plant given the knock-on effect on the Power Factor. This in turn can cause voltage to fall leading to excessive heating with implications for operational costs and lifetime reduction for equipment.
An insight into Current allows you to examine the differences between phases with high variability suggesting that equipment may need rebalancing to avoid additional costs and a higher carbon footprint. Load imbalance can also cause stress on other loads connected to the same network leading to an increase in neutral current return and voltage build up ultimately resulting in excessive power loss.
–> View sample ‘Power Quality Report’ here
16- Daily Sentinel Report
i. What’s in this report?
This report builds on the existing Wattics ‘Sentinel’ report. You’re now able to receive daily consumption reports that notify you as to whether your monitored facilities have fallen out of line with characteristic usage – be it electricity, gas, water, or another metric. The ‘Daily Sentinel Report’ shows all meters linked to a site and reflects an hourly consumption pattern over the course of the day against an expected range of values. This range of values is based on what the system has learned to expect to see based on historical performance for any given hour on any given day. Actual consumption is shown by the black line sitting within the expected range indicated by the green band.
ii. What’s this report useful for?
Our ‘Daily Sentinel Report’ gives insight into characteristic usage for a particular meter over the course of a day. As with the monthly ‘Sentinel Report’, it gives you more nuanced information as to how a meter point is supposed to be performing over certain hour/s on any given day. For a hotel manager, he can again pose questions: Why were there energy spikes over the second weekend of the month when front of house staff arrived for their morning shifts but not on the others? After a change to the housekeeping team on Wednesday mornings, are there differences in their standard practice to account for the energy spikes that are now regularly appearing? Ultimately, it is possible to establish a granular KPI for what performance should look like within an area of operation over a single hour. This allows a hotel manager to focus their attention on problematic performance and to understand precisely what the target should be.
–> View sample ‘Daily Sentinel Report’ here
17- White label report
i. What’s in this report?
Did you know? You can customise the reports with your logo, company colours and contact details, as well as create a custom email address from which to send your branded reports to customers, team members and 3rd parties (fig. 14).
Fig. 14: White-labelled report example
ii. What’s this report useful for?
You can create your own bespoke automated reports that take on the look and feel of your company including as many – or as few, reporting definitions as you’d like.
If yes, and you are new to Wattics, contact us by using the form below to find out more:
If you are an existing Wattics partner, and would like to contact our support team for further information on how to use the Report tool or enable this feature in your dashboard, contact the Wattics Customer Success team at [email protected]
