Power & cooling

Where the shop’s power goes measured

A Sense monitor on the office panel reports real watts, so these are real kilowatt‑hours and real money — not runtime times a guess.

Faded columns are days where the feed dropped out; they are short because data is missing, not because the building used less.

Where it actually goes

Last 33 days at $0.14/kWh. Shares are of everything Sense attributes, which is why they sum to 100% without the mains row.

The shape of a day measured

Average draw at each hour, last 14 days. Dimmed bars are outside 07:00–18:00.

Between 01:00 and 05:00, with nobody in the building, the panel still averages 1924 W — 53% of what it draws in the middle of a working day, and about $65 a month for those overnight hours alone. That gap is where an unattended load hides.

How long each cooling run lasts

A ducted system that keeps stopping under ten minutes is oversized for the space. It satisfies the thermostat on temperature before the coil is cold enough to pull water out of the air, so the room reads cool and still feels damp — and the usual reaction is to set it lower, which costs money and does not fix the damp.

⚠ Worth a look House: 47% of its cooling runs end inside ten minutes, at 45 starts a day. Compressor wear is driven by starts, not by hours. If this holds through the next hot spell it points at equipment sized for a bigger heat load than the building actually has.

Tonight’s plan — House

Blue steps are what this app will command. The shape behind them is the outdoor forecast. Both are °F on one scale.

00:00 → 71°F  ·  07:00 → 75°F  ·  20:00 → 74°F  ·  21:00 → 73°F  ·  22:00 → 72°F  ·  23:00 → 71°F

Steps are 1°F because a two-stage compressor jumps to its expensive high stage on demands bigger than about 1.5–2°F. The ramp waits until after the forecast peak: a degree bought at 95°F costs more than the same degree at 79°F, because the condenser has to dump heat into hotter air. The morning is one jump on purpose — raising a setpoint creates no cooling demand, so there is nothing to stage up.

Against a real bill

This is the only ground truth for money in the system, and there is exactly one bill in it. The comparison above crosses two different months and two different weathers, so read it as an order of magnitude — cooling is a large minority of the house bill — not as a precise share. Entering each new bill as it arrives is what turns every estimate on this page into something checkable.

Is the machine still running?

✓ all feeds live Thermostats, power meter, control loop, planner and forecast are all reporting on time.

Last 7 days of thermostat writes: 165 sent, 1877 already correct, 663 refused by the safety rules, 20 errored. Refusals are the system working — a blocked write is a schedule asking for something the minimum-runtime or step-size rules will not allow.