Home Energy Use? (Baseload vs. Seasonal)

When you're out to save money on your energy bill, the first thing you're going to want to do is understand where your energy use is coming from.  And to do that, we're going to break up your energy use into two big buckets. And we call those buckets baseload energy usage and seasonal energy usage. 

Let's define these.   

Let's start with Baseload Energy Usage. 

Baseload energy use is energy used for loads that use energy ALL YEAR LONG consistently.  Think...your light bulbs, anything typically plugged into outlets, your refrigerator or freezer, your water heater, your pool pump, your appliances like a dishwasher and your washer and dryer or an electric vehicle. 

These loads typically run or use energy just as much in January as they are in July.   

Now let's talk about Seasonal energy usage. 

Seasonal energy use is energy that's used only during certain specific seasons. 

In this case, you're thinking about heating and cooling.  But there's so much more involved than just heating and air conditioning because when your house needs to run your heating and cooling units, how often the heat and cooling units are being operated is depends on so many other factors.  Like on the levels and quality of insulation installed, how leaky your ducting system is and how well insulated they are.  The quality of your windows and how well air sealed and ventilated your home is.  

And so when we're thinking about the difference between baseload energy usage and seasonal energy usage, what we're doing is trying to separate those two buckets so we can understand when we invest money on a lighting upgrade or when we invest money on insulation, what bucket of energy use are we going to impact. 

So that being said, let's talk about more, how you can figure out how this relates to your specific home.   

And so what we're going to do is I want to train you to become someone who can see the matrix when it comes to looking at their monthly energy bill.  So when you see your monthly energy bill over a year, you can pretty instantly see what usage is part of your baseload usage and what usage is part of your seasonal usage.

Let's start the training...What do you see when you look at the graph below what do you see?

When I see this energy bill, what I see a home with gas heating and air conditioning.  I see an imaginary dotted line that goes horizontally across the average of the lowest three months of energy usage, to create a baseload energy usage that is consistent throughout the year. 

And everything above this line is likely air conditioning.  Something like this:

And so I can take everything in blue and that is how much of my energy use is going to air conditioning.  And if I added a whole house fan to reduce air conditioning usage, or I improved my air conditioning efficiency, this is how much of the pie I'd be able to impact. 

Let's look at another profile. 

 So what do you see?  Well, I see a home that has electric heating that does not have air conditioning.  I'm drawing my baseload line on the average of the lowest three months.  Everything below that is energy used consistently out throughout the year.  And then in the winter months, I'm heating with electricity.  You can see it here:

So, now I know if I upgrade my furnace, here is how much electric heating energy and thus energy cost for heating, I'm able to impact.

 Let's take a look at another one:

What if you see something like this?  Your home likely has electric heating and air conditioning.  You can draw a very, very quick line here to say, okay, I'm going to average the lowest two or three months.  It would look like this:

Everything below that is my baseload usage and everything above that is going to be my seasonal usage, heating and cooling.   And it's going to be impacted by being reduced when I improve the efficiency of my heating and cooling system, or my building envelope, or my windows, or how well my ducts are sealed, or how they're optimized within the home.  All of those things will have a direct measurable impact on reducing your seasonal energy usage. 

Let's look at a natural gas example for one moment.   For natural gas, this would be a very, very common looking profile:

For most homes what you'll see is a relatively low line and above the line you'd find your heating natural gas usage.  Like this:

Everything below the line being the other domestic natural gas energy users.  Typically water heating, cooking, drying clothes.   And again, you could calculate how much of your natural gas costs are going to your heating and act and invest accordingly.  

Now one more example I want to give.  What if you see an anomaly like below where it just doesn't make sense? 

Well, think about specific large loads that might use a large amount of energy during specific periods.  So in this case, we have these two summer months that are kind of using a lot more gas than we'd expect.  Unless you have something like a spa. And then you're not going to include this in your seasonal usage.  See here:

Then, you're going to account for that separately in terms as usage from a spa that you can pinpoint and identify in terms of costs.  

So overall, understanding at a high level how much of your energy usage is going to seasonal usage and how much is going to baseload usage is going to be the very, very first step in really being able to go after your energy bill and perform upgrades that are going to make a difference for your home. 

If you'd like to see a video walking through the content in this blog you can find it on YouTube:

If you love this content and want to learn more about home energy upgrades and how to approach it like a ninja building scientist, get The Home Energy Course and start your journey to become a home energy expert!