Finding a more elegant was to aggregate hourly data to mean hourly data using zoo - r

Question

I have a chunk of data logging temperatures from a few dozen devices every hour for over a year. The data are stored as a zoo object. I'd very much like to summarize those data by looking at the average values for every one of the 24 hours in a day (1am, 2am, 3am, etc.). So that for each device I can see what its average value is for all the 1am times, 2am times, and so on. I can do this with a loop but sense that there must be a way to do this in zoo with an artful use of aggregate.zoo. Any help?
require(zoo)
# random hourly data over 30 days for five series
x <- matrix(rnorm(24 * 30 * 5),ncol=5)
# Assign hourly data with a real time and date
x.DateTime <- as.POSIXct("2014-01-01 0100",format = "%Y-%m-%d %H") +
seq(0,24 * 30 * 60 * 60, by=3600)
# make a zoo object
x.zoo <- zoo(x, x.DateTime)
#plot(x.zoo)
# what I want:
# the average value for each series at 1am, 2am, 3am, etc. so that
# the dimensions of the output are 24 (hours) by 5 (series)
# If I were just working on x I might do something like:
res <- matrix(NA,ncol=5,nrow=24)
for(i in 1:nrow(res)){
res[i,] <- apply(x[seq(i,nrow(x),by=24),],2,mean)
}
res
# how can I avoid the loop and write an aggregate statement in zoo that
# will get me what I want?

Answer 1

Calculate the hour for each time point and then aggregate by that:
hr <- as.numeric(format(time(x.zoo), "%H"))
ag <- aggregate(x.zoo, hr, mean)
dim(ag)
## [1] 24 5
ADDED
Alternately use hours from chron or hour from data.table:
library(chron)
ag <- aggregate(x.zoo, hours, mean)

Answer 2

This is quite similar to the other answer but takes advantage of the fact the the by=... argument to aggregate.zoo(...) can be a function which will be applied to time(x.zoo):
as.hour <- function(t) as.numeric(format(t,"%H"))
result <- aggregate(x.zoo,as.hour,mean)
identical(result,ag) # ag from G. Grothendieck answer
# [1] TRUE
Note that this produces a result identical to the other answer, not not the same as yours. This is because your dataset starts at 1:00am, not midnight, so your loop produces a matrix wherein the 1st row corresponds to 1:00am and the last row corresponds to midnight. These solutions produce zoo objects wherein the first row corresponds to midnight.