ELCAP operational experience

• Published in: Energy and buildings Vol. 19; no. 3; pp. 167 - 178
• Main Authors: Sandusky, W.F., Pearson, E.W., Miller, N.E., Crowder, R.S., Parker, G.B., Mazzucchi, R.P., Stokes, G.M., Thomas, J.J., Pratt, R.G., Schuster, G.J., Halverson, M.A., Stoops, J.L., Peterson, F.J., Gillman, R.A., Stokes, R.A., Hauser, S.G.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 1993
• ISSN: 0378-7788
• DOI: 10.1016/0378-7788(93)90025-P

This paper documents our experience in conducting a major field program to acquire end-use electrical consumption data from a diverse set of commercial and residential buildings throughout the Pacific Northwest. This field program, known as the End-Use Load and Consumer Assessment Program (ELCAP), was initiated in August 1983. As of May 1989, data was being acquired from 390 residential structures and 111 commercial buildings, with 16 million hourly records collected monthly that occupied 2050 megabytes (MB) of electronic storage. This data volume doubled by 1991. A data acquisition program of this size can incur many difficulties. Recruiting sample homes, designing and fabricating data acquisition equipment and sensors, defining protocols, installing and maintaining equipment, acquiring, processing, verifying, and characterizing data all posed challenges, even to those of us with extensive experience in these areas. Because of the ground-breaking character of the study, there was little guidance available, and we made (and overcame) our share of mistakes. We believe that this chronicle of our experience will be useful to others embarking on large-scale end-use load studies.