Fuel Metering

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Hello!

I've been modeling a trio of buildings in EQuest and am having some difficulties with metering. I have it set up so that all three buildings are fed from the same plant but I want to meter the energy usage in each individual building. My electricity meters seem to be working fine but when I set each building on a different fuel meter (FM-A, FM-B, FM-C), no usage is coming to the "C" building and very little is showing on "B" building. I've tried everything I can think of but just can't get the fuel meters working. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Samantha MacHardy

Samantha M
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Good morning Samantha,

What equipment is in the central plant.is it a boiler?

Sheila Sagerer

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It's a natural gas boiler, sorry! I should have mentioned that!

Samantha M
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Then it would seem you are modelling the boiler loading (lead - lag) rather
than the building loading. If you wish to isolate the buildings, I think
you need 3 hot water loops. If you wish, they could be secondary loops
feeding off a common primary loop, that way you would not have to dedicate
boilers to the individual buildings but you could look at the heating loads
for the secondary loops on the PS-H reports to see what their heating loads
are like.

Hope this helps.

Brian

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In order to truly isolate the natural gas for the boiler, I would model this
using a separate meter created just for the boiler plant along with the
three secondary hot water loops (one for each building). Then, the fuel use
for the boiler could be distributed manually to each of the buildings
through post-processing using the PS-H reports for each building as
suggested by Brian below.

Any additional fuel meters created and assigned to each building would only
log the fuel use for domestic hot water, cooking, or other end uses not
connected to the central plant boiler.

Good luck and have a nice day.

Sheila Sagerer

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Modeling the system with three secondary loops has distributed loads to each building so thank you Brian for the help! Sheila, using the meter in isolation for the boiler is helping to see the loads just on that boiler. While these are helpful, the loads aren't quite lining up. From the BEPS report, I can see that ~5000 MBTU is used for space heating but the sum of the secondary building loops is only producing ~1500 MBTU and even if I include the primary hot water loop in that total it only totals ~2500. Any idea where the difference could be hiding?

Thanks :)

Samantha

Samantha M
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What is the boiler efficiency? If the average efficiency for the year is
60%, your 2500 will be more like 4000 MBTU at the boiler.
Rohini

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R B
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Also - if you have a VAV with hydronic reheat, your zonal reheat will show up as space heating. Make sure you select the correct loop (secondary) for that - otherwise it will default to the main loop and not show up in your secondary loops.

Vikram Sami, LEED AP BD+C

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