The WattIQ System employs our Intelisocket product line to continuously monitor energy consumption from your equipment, along with other key variables. In the Asset Utilization product, we then employ our proprietary machine learning algorithms to characterize utilization "episodes". From those episodes, we then summarize asset utilization patterns using a variety of summary statistics, which you can visualize graphically, build tabular reports, or overlay on heatmaps to see repeating patterns over time.
This documentation article defines the terminology and variables employed in our Asset Utilization product.
Utilization Episodes
WattIQ defines a "utilization episode" as a window of time, delimited by a start and end time, during which the electrical consumption profile of a monitored device displayed the statistical characteristics that differentiate it from sitting idle, or in some cases performing background processing of data which our algorithms have been trained to ignore. Thus, not all elevated power consumption constitutes "usage".
WattIQ also does not analyze every class of equipment to determine utilization episodes. Some classes of equipment are "always" operating when switched on. Equipment designed to maintain a constant operating environment are of this type: refrigeration and freezers, incubators, water baths, and so on. We do not attempt to determine discrete episodes of utilization for such devices, and recommend monitoring such equipment with our Asset Condition product to alert on deviations from good operating baselines instead.
Utilization episodes typically begin being recorded shortly after you install an Intelisocket on your equipment, but it can take some time for enough data to be available to determine what constitutes idle versus active. The amount of time required depends upon how often you use a piece of equipment. If the equipment is used several times per day, it may only take a few days of data to recognize the pattern, but if a piece of equipment is used only a few times per month, it may take time for utilization episode analysis to stabilize. We recommend that with infrequently used equipment, you plan to use it several times after data collection begins, since this will improve data analysis immediately, without waiting.
WattIQ analyzes electrical consumption data daily and records episodes for the previous day.
Utilization Summary Statistics - Visualizer
At the same time utilization episodes are recorded for each asset, we summarize utilization on two primary time scales: hourly statistics, and daily summaries. The statistics in this section are available to graph in the Visualizer, alongside the raw utilization episodes themselves, which can be overlaid on the power consumption data to get a detailed picture of device usage.
In the definitions below and throughout this article, "time slot" refers to either an hour period, or a day, depending upon the time scale involved.
Percent of time in use: This records the fraction of an hour or day that the device was in use, and is obtained simply by totaling the number of minutes a device was in use during the hour or day, and dividing by 60 minutes or 1440 minutes.
Minutes of usage: This variable records the number of minutes the device was in use during the hour or day.
Percent of time in use (restricted to business hours): Since you may be interested in seeing usage relative to your expected business hours (which are set under Admin > Settings by an administrator), the above two statistics are also calculated with restriction to the business hours. This has no effect on hours that are solidly within your business day, but it may exclude some usage which occurs outside the business hours from your percentage of time in use.
Minutes of usage (restricted to business hours): This records the number of minutes the device was in use, but restricting the calculation to exclude episodes or fractions of episodes which occur outside your stated business hours (see previous definition).
Utilization Summary Statistics - Utilization Reports
Under the Utilization menu, you can build a variety of tabular and graphical reports to see equipment utilization patterns in aggregate, or trends over time. To accomplish this, we define some additional summary statistics which are relative to the time period over which you define your report. For example, if you create a report over the "Last 30 Days" in the Time Range selector, your summary statistics will reflect utilization aggregated across the previous 30 days.
In this kind of aggregated report, we provide the following measurement variables, which aggregate the "primary" utilization data described above.
Average Daily Usage: This is the arithmetic mean or average of the daily "minutes of usage" values during the time frame of the report you select.
Average Daily Usage (Business Hours Only): This is the arithmetic mean or average of the daily "minutes of usage" values during the time frame of the report you select, restricted to business hours only.
Average Daily Usage (Only Days Used): This is the arithmetic mean or average of the daily "minutes of usage" values during the time frame of the report you select, excluding days where no usage occurred. This is useful for devices with very sparse usage since dividing by the total amount of time can create very small fractions when all days are included.
% Time in Use (with variants for business hours and "only days used"): This set of variables parallels "Average Daily Usage" but is expressed in percentage format, making it easy to compare across classes of equipment. The same variants exist for restriction to business hours, or only to days with one or more usage episodes.
Total Usage: The total usage variable adds up the length of all usage episodes in the time frame requested for the report.
Total Usage (business hours): This is similar to "Total Usage", above, but restricted only to utilization during business hours.
Days With Usage: This variable records the number of days during the time frame of the report that one or more usage episodes were recorded.
Days Without Usage: This variable is the "mirror image" of "days with usage", recording the number of days within the time frame that no usage episodes were recorded.
Average Uses Per Day: This variable records the average number of usage episodes per day, over the time frame selected for the report.
Average Uses Per Day (Only Days Used): This variable records the average number of usage episodes per day, over the time frame selected for the report, but excluding days where no usage episodes were seen.
Days Since Last Use: This statistic is NOT relative to a time frame (you will notice that the time frame selector disappears if you choose this statistic), and it records how many days it has been since a usage episode has been recorded.
Total Energy Consumption: This statistic totals the energy consumption by devices (or groups of devices, such as equipment categories) during the time frame selected for the report.
Additionally, when making a Trend report to visualize how these statistics change over time, you can select whether multiple assets in each grouping are aggregated. For example, if you wish to understand how "days with usage" has trended by equipment class, you might look at the average across assets in each group, or you may wish to see the minimum and maximum values for "days with usage" for each equipment class.
Related Articles
For electrical variables collected by our Intelisocket product and relevant to energy consumption, see Electrical Power Data Variables - Definition and Description
For variables collected and available in our Asset Condition product, see Asset Condition Variables - Definition and Description