Tom Delconte posts on Home Energy Pros one of the more ridiculous things I’ve seen in a while:

… shhh, don’t tell ! I recently ran across this functionality on Accuweather, after doing a google search for something or other:

http://www.accuweather.com/en/us/new-york-ny/10007/home-energy-effi…

If you click on the about button, you essentially get a zero explanation. Monitoring it for several days, it seems to prioritize sunniness, then temperature, then who knows? Prioritizing sunniness would mean they assume that most homes have a great solar orientation, especially for the rooms used the most in daylight hours, for which as far as I know there is no data:

http://oikos.com/esb/42/solar.html

Perhaps this breakthrough in weather forecasting(certainly more important to saving energy and the climate than ‘golf weather’) can be useful to building designers and smart thermostat designers?

However, from what I gather, Tom’s suspicion that the algorith is primarily driven by solar conditions doesn’t seem to hold much water, as this forecast for Denver makes no sense whatsoever.

Note the daytime temperatures and cloud conditions. Hard to imagine 36 F and snowy is more efficient than 70 and sunny!