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Heating & cooling degree days

Heating degree days (HDD) and cooling degree days (CDD) measure how cold or warm the last twelve months were against a fixed base temperature. When a supplier quote assumes a normal weather year, this tells you whether your site has run colder or warmer than baseline so you can adjust the volume estimate before you sign.

Why this matters for procurement

Suppliers price fixed contracts on an estimated annual quantity. That estimate is usually the previous year’s consumption, normalised to a notional ‘average’ UK winter. If the year you used as the baseline was unusually mild or cold, the volume on your contract can be wrong by 5–15 per cent — which feeds straight into take-or-pay clauses and unit-rate trueing.

Degree days give you a transparent reference. Compare the last twelve months at your site against a long-run regional average and you can see how much of your bill movement was weather and how much was operational change. It is also the cleanest way to evidence the impact of an efficiency upgrade — lighting, controls, building fabric — after the fact.

Enter any UK postcode. We resolve coordinates through postcodes.io and pull the daily mean temperature series from the Open-Meteo archive. No personal data is stored.

Only the postcode is sent to the lookup services. Nothing is logged against you.

How this is calculated

For each day we take the mean outdoor air temperature at the postcode coordinates from the Open-Meteo archive (typically 5–9 km grid resolution, ECMWF and DWD reanalysis). Heating degree days are the daily shortfall below 15.5 °C summed over the period; cooling degree days are the daily excess above 22 °C. These are the standard UK base temperatures referenced by CIBSE Guide A and used by most UK energy bureaux. This is a simple degree-day method — useful for directional adjustment and quick comparison — not a full regression-based weather normalisation. For contracts above 100,000 kWh per year we recommend a regression model against your half-hourly data.

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