The data loggers which I use when doing building performance evaluations are great (Onset HOBO U12-012), but they have one little quirk that makes working with the data really irritating – dates come out in a variety of formats when imported into Excel. It seems like it’s an actually an Excel problem. The data in [...]
You can’t see the wind, but just like other intangible things you can visualise it using charts. This post introduces you to a couple of ways of visualising the wind resource for a particular location. It’s an important early step in deciding whether or not a wind turbine is a good idea. Wind rose charts [...]
Passing on a request from a couple of researchers trying to collect a comprehensive list of Excel versions and regional settings (things like decimal separators, types of brackets, etc.). If you have a couple of minutes spare and use Excel, head over to their site and download their workbook (the link is a bit awkward [...]
If there’s one single site on the internet that I couldn’t live without (perhaps with the exception of Google), it would be StackOverflow from StackExchange. It’s an absolute life-saver for programmers, and as a fairly recent convert to programming, I struggle to think what it must have been like in the days before it existed. [...]
Go straight to the web form. If you want to know how to design your building you to need to know what the local weather is like. If you want to understand how your building is performing you need to know what weather it was coping with. If you want to install renewable energy – [...]
Max, a visitor here, recently left a comment asking about accessing the public transit travel time option in the Google Directions API. Up until then I hadn’t used it and assumed it worked the same as the walking and driving time options, but that turned out not to be the case. The key difference is [...]
One quite popular post on this site is the Geocoding for Excel post. In common with lots of the code snippets here, the code was stripped down to the bare minimum to make it understandable and functional. I happened to be debugging a recent tool (the EPW weather file finder) and thought that it might [...]
There’s a difficult-to-Google, but extremely useful equation for linear regression called the Normal Equation. I used to have an implementation in VBA and somehow lost is. As it happened, I needed it today so I spent a little while recreating it. This isn’t what I actually need the equation for, just a test case for [...]
If you’re anything like me, seeing badly-formatted things like “12 m3” for “12 m3”, typos like “34 kgC02” for “34 kgCO2”– or worse, combinations like “100 KWh/m2” for “100 kWh/m2” – really rubs you up the wrong way. If it doesn’t then trust me, anyone copy editing, and many people just reading your work really [...]
This tool was updated to v1.02 on 2/11/2012 * Ever had the problem of looking at all the weather files available from the EnergyPlus weather files site and wondering which is closest to the location you’re modelling in? The oCo Carbon Weather file finder will save you the trouble of looking them up, downloading them, [...]
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