FAQ

Warning: the following response is somewhat advanced.  It was not written for beginning Metrix users.

Actually, there is a way you can billmatch using two years' worth of data instead of just one. Essentially what you can do is combine 1/2 of the quantities from the first 12 months with 1/2 of the quantities from the second 12 months into an average for the 24 month period. You can create 2 modifications, one for each 12 month period, and a third billmatching modification that will cut the baseline in half.

In this example, we will assume that you have 24 bills in the tuning period, and that you were unable to tune due to poor R2 value, and that you want to billmatch the bills. We also assume you are doing this for On Peak period bills only (step 15). If you want to billmatch 24 months for a TOU meter, then you can follow the same procedure, but make appropriate changes for step 15 below.

Step I. Tuning

1. 1. In the tuning view, zero out the tuning coefficients for the meter (you will have to put the tuning screen to manual to do this).

Step II. Adding a Modification for the First 12 Months

2. Add a modification to the meter (in the modifications view).
3. Select the following settings in the modification form: absolute offsets, included and excluded. Depending upon what physical units you are doing this for, select consumption and/or demand.
4. Open the Factor History Sub Form.
5. Set the number in the bottom left hand of the Factor History form to 12. (If it changes to 13, that is ok.) By doing this, you are telling Metrix that you want 365 days worth of data from the 12th bill back (towards the 1st bill) to be replicated into future months.

Step III. Adding a Modification for the Second 12 Months

6. Add another modification to the meter (in the modifications view).
7. Select the following settings in the modification form: absolute offsets, included and excluded. Depending upon what physical units you are doing this for, select consumption and/or demand. Your selections here should be the same as those selected in step 3.
8. Open the Factor History Sub Form.
9. Set the number in the bottom left hand of the Factor History form to 24. (If it changed to 13 when you did this in step 5, then you probably should set this to 25 instead of 24.) By doing this, you are telling Metrix that you want 365 days worth of data from the 24th bill back (towards the 13th bill) to be replicated into future months.

Step IV. Adding a Modification to Cut the Total in Half.

If we stopped here, for each month during the performance period, we would have a baseline that equals the sum of the 1st and 2nd years' bills. To cut the total in half, and thus get the average of the two bills, do the following:

10. Add another modification to the meter. This time, be sure to place this new modification below the other two. One way of doing this is to click on the second modification, and then select Edit | New from the menu.
11. Select the following setting in the modification form: Direct Entry.
12. You may want to change the Effective Starting Date to the beginning of the Installation Period. However, if you just leave it as is, you should be ok.
13. Open the Factor History Sub Form.
14. Select the Time Interval (top left corner of the Factor History Form) to be Yearly.
15. In the first two rows of the OnPK + % column (if you are doing this for energy) and/or the first two rows of the OnPD + % column (if you are doing this for demand), enter "-50" (just the negative fifty only, no quotation marks).
16. Set the number in the bottom left hand of the Factor History form to 2.

If you couldn't tune in the first place because there was a time-oriented trend in the data, such as increase in energy usage over time due to an increase in equipment, then you probably shouldn't be using 24 months to establish your baseline. If this were the case, then you should try to tune using just the last 12 months. If you still are not able to tune, then you should billmatch just the last 12 months, and not all 24 months, as was done here.

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