After-Hours Baseload: What a Flat Night Curve Actually Tells You

The overnight segment of a load curve looks boring until you compare it month to month. A baseload that creeps upward without occupancy increasing usually means something was left running — not necessarily a fault, often a schedule change nobody documented.

Signatures we commonly see

Corridor lighting at 50% overnight produces a steady plateaux from 23:00–06:00. When a hotel switches to full dimming at midnight, that plateaux drops by 8–15 kWh depending on wing length.

Kitchen exhaust interlocks should shut down with the hood schedule. If the curve shows a small motor load at 03:00 every night, we ask maintenance to verify the interlock relay.

Guest-floor water heaters in older Jeju buildings sometimes lack central scheduling. The curve shows repetitive 20-minute pulses — distinctive and easy to annotate once you have seen it twice.

A Seogwipo example

Wing C at a client hotel ran corridor lights at full until 01:00 because housekeeping preferred the brightness. Moving shutdown to 23:00 did not affect guest complaints but lowered the baseload enough to appear clearly in the quarterly benchmark. The change cost nothing except a staff memo.

What we need from you

Tell us about any schedule changes before the meter read. We will still catch anomalies in the data, but your context makes the annotation useful instead of speculative.