📊 Weather Normalization

University of Idaho Integrated Design Lab | Climate Analysis Tools

Separate weather swings from real changes in how a building uses energy.

â–¶ About this tool — what you need & how it works

Monthly energy bills rise and fall partly because of the weather. Weather normalization fits a regression of each fuel's consumption against degree‑days, then reports the expected (weather‑predicted) usage for every month. The gap between actual and expected isolates changes that aren't explained by weather — retrofits, occupancy, controls, or operational drift.

You'll need, for each month in the period: electricity (kWh), natural gas (therms), geothermal (gallons, if applicable), plus HDD and CDD for the same month.

Getting degree‑days from NOAA:

  1. Open the NOAA National Weather Service site and pick the nearest data center.
  2. Go to the NOWData tab and refine the location if needed.
  3. Under Product, choose Monthly Summarized Data.
  4. Set the year range, set Variable to HDD (then again to CDD), click Go.
  5. Copy each month's value into the matching row below.

Seasons follow the standard convention: cooling = May–Sep (regressed against CDD), heating = Oct–Apr (regressed against HDD). Energy is converted to a common kBtu basis:

Electricity × 3.412 kBtu/kWh
Natural gas × 100 kBtu/therm
Geothermal × 0.54275 kBtu/gal

1Enter monthly data

One row per billing month. Leave geothermal at 0 if not applicable. Season is assigned automatically.

Month Electricity kWh Natural gas therm Geothermal gal HDD CDD Season
â–¶ Bulk paste from a spreadsheet

Paste tab- or comma-separated rows in the order Month, Electricity, Gas, Geothermal, HDD, CDD (a header row is fine — it's detected and skipped). Months can be 2019-05, 5/2019, or May 2019.