Seeking advice for performance analysis workflows for new and existing builds.
Hi all,
Im seeking advice on how to start doing performance analysis/ energy modeling on my company’s builds. First a bit of context: we are currently building single family homes and performing energy retrofits on existing homes. We are pretty much relying on empirical building science knowledge and CoolCalc manual j calculations for most of our workflows, and we are getting some pretty good results! However this is not enough for us to jump to commercial or larger scale projects.
We wish to learn more about how to incorporate other workflows and software products in order to aid our design process and be able to do energy optimizations based on more detailed simulations rather than rules of thumb and simple calculations. We are taking a look at products such as Sketchup Sefaira.
Id love to know what processes you have incorporated into your builds to see where we can improve! Thanks in advance.
GBA Detail Library
A collection of one thousand construction details organized by climate and house part
Replies
Have you seen the BEopt software there is no charge to use the software. The tax payers funded the project. You build a model of the home with the windows and doors overhangs. It uses your local weather data and fuel costs your interest costs your guess at inflation. The model runs every 15 minutes for a year to calculate the operating costs. You can compare the current home to a range on different models and their costs it draws a graph the house in the left cost the least to build the ones on the right cost the most to build. The ones at the top cost the most to operate given the fuel costs and the interests cost to buy the equipment. The sweet spot is the one closest to the bottom generally in the center.
https://www.nrel.gov/buildings/beopt.html
Learning to use the program and enter your first house will be slow 20 maybe 40 hours. The learning curve is steep after the fourth house I am thinking 3 to 6 hours to enter the data. If you decide to try it, be sure to find and watch the training videos on YouTube.
Walta