A Building Energy Reference Tool

You are visitor number

How Does Your Building's Energy Use Compare?

How does your building's energy use compare to that of other buildings? Arch provides a simple way to see how your building's energy use compares to similar buildings. Currently you may search for buildings in of eighteen activity categories and with similar floor area.

If you have not assembled all the requested information, you may leave any of the fields blank, except for building activity. Note that providing more information will narrow the buildings in the comparison to those more closely matching your building.

For more discussion, Click Here or go to Links.

Step One:

What is the principal activity of your building? 

Step Two:

Enter the first three digits of the zipcode your building is located in.
Entering your zip code will restrict the results to buildings within the same US Census Division.

Step Three:

Enter the building's floor area. (gross square feet)
Buildings are considered to have comparable floor areas if they have between half and twice your area; if the area field is blank, no filtering is done on floor area.

Step Four:

Enter the annual energy consumption based on the utility bills for your building for each of the following fuels:
Fuel Energy Consumption
Electricity
Natural Gas
Other   Million Btu/year

Step Five:

Building energy use can be reported as the actual energy used on site, or as the energy used at the energy source (about 2/3 of the "primary energy" that goes into an electric power plant is lost in the process as waste heat).   Source energy corresponds more closely to energy costs than does site energy.
Select which you want to use: Site    Source

Step Six:

Data entered on this website is saved and may later be added to our database.
If you are just exploring and do not think these data should be saved, check here: .

Step Seven:

(this should take about 5 seconds)

DISCLAIMER: LBNL provides no warranties on the data provided: Use at your own discretion.

This site has been funded in part by the California Energy Commission Public Interest Energy Research program. California visitors please also visit Cal-ARCH, a California-specific tool.

We welcome your Comments on this site

This page last modified March 27, 2001

Back to EETD home page