ID Daily Peak Demand Cycles with Diurnal Demand Exports

Posted on June 18, 2021 by dmilanobadgermeter — Leave a comment

Diurnal (die-yer-nal), adj. – of or during the day; daily or each day.

Diurnal cycles are daily recurring patterns. Diurnal Demand reports are used to identify daily peak water demand cycles. In areas affected by drought and other conditions that affect the availability of water, tracking peak demand becomes essential to managing the cost of purchasing and moving water.

Peak water demand also factors greatly in preparing sewer systems to handle increased demand associated with seasonal needs, major holidays and other events. If you can predict water demand, you can predict sewer demand and thus prepare for both.

A full explanation of diurnal water patterns is beyond the score of this document. To learn more about about them, search Google for the terms “Sewer Sociology” and “Diurnal Water Pattern.”

You will find Diurnal Demand exports on the BEACON Monitor page under Actions>Data Export. Export options let you select one of:

Meter ID.
Meter Serial Number.
Account ID.
Endpoint Serial Number.

Set Read Interval to one of: quarter hourly, hourly, daily, weekly or monthly. All the Unit of Measure choices in BEACON are available. When selecting a date range, keep in mind that it is possible to generate a vast amount of data, so choose carefully.

The Diurnal Demand export menu.

After downloading the CSV file, open it in a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets.
To chart the results in Google sheets (consult the Excel user manual for similar instructions) do the following:

Shift-Click to select columns that represent meters whose usage you want to chart.
TIP: For more meaningful chart results, select fewer meters.
Click Insert>Chart.
Check Use row 1 as headers.
The result produces usage graph color coded by column. In the example below, Meter IDs are color-coded blue, red, yellow, and green.

This sample Diurnal Demand export is an excerpt of seven days of hourly usage for hundreds of residential meters. Less than one day of hourly flow data is visible for eight meters. Four meters have been selected and charted. Note that the rows in Column A of the export contain timestamps of when the flow occurred, while row 1 in Columns B through I contain Meter IDs. Rows 2 through 22 under Columns B through I contain hourly flow totals.