Site evidence & demand
The key idea
A house can contain several households. A large roof can cover a shop, a store or an unused building. Some customers share a meter; some mapped structures have no electrical demand. Treat a map as the start of an assessment.
Before assigning demand, distinguish three records: the structure, the customers or uses inside it, and the evidence for the assignment. A surveyed customer count can still have an estimated energy profile. Keep those uncertainties separate.
Count what you know
Suppose one structure contains two households. For this exercise only, assume each uses 2–4 kWh/day. Its estimated daily energy is 4–8 kWh. It remains one structure and two customers.
If the next building has an unknown use, do not enter zero demand to make the totals complete. Identify that demand as unknown. If a structure is excluded because it is outside the service area, its customers must not enter the included demand total.
Explore a teaching settlement
Start with structure D. It has one declared customer but no assigned class. Predict how the known-demand subtotal changes when you assign it as a shop. Then exclude it. Finally, change structure A from two customers to three.
Solid outline: surveyed in this invented scenario. Dashed: inferred. Positions show grouping only, not route distances.
Structure D
- Included structures
- 5
- Declared customers
- 6
- Known demand subtotal
- 16–28 kWh/day
1 included structure has customers with no class. Its demand is unknown and is not zero; the range is an incomplete subtotal. 3 included structures retain inferred evidence.
Data table: Structure evidence and customer assumptions
| Structure | Included | Evidence | Class | Customers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | Yes | Surveyed | household | 2 |
| B | Yes | Inferred | household | 1 |
| C | Yes | Surveyed | shop | 1 |
| D | Yes | Inferred | unknown | 1 |
| E | No | Inferred | unknown | 0 |
| F | Yes | Inferred | household | 1 |
Model note · Synthetic settlement A–F; no real locations. Daily energy assumptions: household 2–4 and shop 8–12 kWh per customer. These ranges are teaching choices, not survey data or confidence intervals.
The initial known subtotal is 16–28 kWh/day: four classified household customers contribute 8–16 kWh and one shop contributes 8–12 kWh. Structure D remains outside this subtotal because its class is unknown. The range does not describe the complete settlement demand.
Marking a record as surveyed does not change its assumed energy in this exercise. It changes the evidence status. In a real assessment, use the survey information to revise the count, class and profile themselves.
A map does not settle the site conditions
Check access, land rights, occupancy, terrain, seasonal activity and service boundaries separately. A building dataset may be incomplete or outdated. Classification from roof area or location is an inference until other evidence supports it.
A daily energy total also does not establish the coincident peak. Continue with load profiles and diversity to examine when customers use power together.
How the demand subtotal is formedOptional — the page reads completely without it
For every included structure whose class is known, multiply its customer count n by the assumed daily energy band for that class, and sum each bound separately:
known-demand subtotal, lower bound
Elow = Σ ni · elow,class
upper bound
Ehigh = Σ ni · ehigh,class
Excluded structures contribute neither customers nor energy. Included customers with an unknown class go into the unknown count, nunknown; they are never assigned a zero-energy profile.
The 2–4 kWh/household/day and 8–12 kWh/shop/day bands are authored teaching assumptions, not field measurements, catalog recommendations or statistical confidence intervals. The diagram has no geographic scale and performs no routing or peak-demand calculation.
See it in Phasor
Review structures, exclusions and customer classifications in Site assessment. Carry the accepted consumer mix into the Load builder, and keep inferred values visible for later review.