Comparing what is comparable: degree days, baseline year, kWh/m²
A cold winter pushes consumption up without a single setting having changed. Any honest energy analysis therefore begins by neutralising the weather and fixing a baseline. Softee does both in the calculation, not in the commentary.
How does Softee neutralise the effect of the weather?
By degree-day correction. Degree days come from the Météo-France climatological API, computed on an 18 °C base for heating and a 26 °C base for cooling, from the nearest active station to the site.
Heating consumption can then be displayed corrected for degree days and compared against a baseline year of your choosing. That is a climate correction and a comparison against a baseline — not regulatory compliance, and we will not let proximity imply otherwise.
What is the energy signature, and what does Softee compute from it?
The energy signature plots consumption against an explanatory variable — typically degree days — to read a building’s thermal behaviour rather than its invoice alone.
Softee computes the regression line, its coefficient of determination R² and the residual standard deviation. One detail matters: the residual standard deviation is only produced from three points onwards. On two points the regression is exact by construction and a dispersion figure would be meaningless; the code therefore refuses to invent one.
Why that detail is on a commercial page. Because it is verifiable, and because it says something about how the product is written.
A tool that shows a standard deviation on two points is showing a false number, and nobody notices until a decision has been built on it.
Does Softee produce an energy rating?
Softee rates a site from A to G by applying the thresholds of the French DPE 2021 method, either on primary energy consumption in kWh PE/m²·yr or on emissions in kg CO₂e/m²·yr, and keeps the less favourable of the two letters.
This is not a DPE. A DPE is a regulated French energy performance assessment carried out by an accredited assessor; what Softee produces is a rating of measured values on the same thresholds. The distinction is not editorial caution: it is the difference between a management indicator and a document you can rely on legally.
What does the summary shipped with the product contain?
A page bringing together the key indicators — consumption, CO₂, water, cost, ratio — with their percentage change, the energy mix, the ranking of best- and worst-performing sites in kWh/m², performance by energy, and a year N / N−1 / N−2 table carrying each site’s target and the estate total.
Dedicated Electricity and Heating tabs are enabled and configured separately, each with its own key indicators, ratio, target and history depth. The summary is not recomputed on every view: it is precomputed nightly and served from a versioned snapshot, invalidated as soon as a setting that affects it changes — which is what keeps the page fast on a large estate without serving stale data.
Can you build your own dashboards?
Yes, and each person their own. Ten widget types are available: single value, table, chart, gauge, photo, Gantt, details, chart by site, table by site, energy label. They can be positioned, duplicated, and their calculation re-run for a given year.
The chart widget offers ten chart types: bar, pie, doughnut, line, polar area, pyramid, funnel, heat map, combined chart, energy signature. Display goes down to the minute and up to the year, via the hour, day, week, month and quarter — seven granularities. Reusable chart styles apply across all widgets, and your logo can be uploaded.
10 widget types
from the single value to the Gantt chart and the energy label.
10 chart types
including the heat map, the combined chart and the energy signature.
7 granularities
minute, hour, day, week, month, quarter, year.
Can you define your own indicators?
Yes, of three kinds: a raw measurement, a calculated indicator, or a ratio — the last of which carries kWh/m², drawing on a site parameter you have defined. Indicators then combine in the sites × indicators matrix, one row per site and one column per indicator, with the unit of each.
What this page does not claim
- Softee does not produce a DPE. It rates measured values on the thresholds of the DPE 2021 method. That is not a regulatory assessment and it does not substitute for one.
- Degree-day correction is not compliance with the French tertiary decree. It is a climate correction and a comparison against a baseline year. What the regulation requires is a separate subject, covered on the page devoted to it.
- No saving is calculated. The product compares one year against the previous one and against a target. It does not attribute a fall in consumption to an action, nor to its own use — so no reduction percentage is publishable here.
- No formatted report. Output comes out as a spreadsheet, CSV or JSON, or is read on screen. There is no PDF report generator in the product.
Frequently asked questions about analytics and dashboards
Bring a data series that is giving you trouble
A building whose consumption you cannot account for, two years that are hard to compare. That is the best possible test of an analysis tool — far better than a demonstration on a dataset prepared to behave well.