Transcript:

Now, Accessible EnergyPlus. I'm Karen Walkerman and the tool is called EP3.
The website is EP3.Solutions.
I've been energy modeling for about 18 years and I think the best way to talk about EP3 is to share a little bit of my story with you.
So I started modeling with eQUEST and I really loved eQUEST for a long time.
There's quite a lot to love about it. There's wizards for absolutely everything.
Building geometry and there are wizards for building envelope, for space types, for internal loads, for HVAC systems.
And when you exit the wizard, you end up in a very comprehensive and cohesive environment.
Everything is in the same place and you can go start to finish with a model without ever leaving that one environment.
Simulation times are also really, really fast. So that helps if you need to debug or do some error checking on a model.
eQUEST also provides colorful and detailed outputs. So some things you can share with your clients.
We also have hourly output reports, which are quite useful for transparency, for error checking, post-processing, that sort of thing.
And eQUEST is very widely used and respected. It's used all over the world and a lot of the output reports merge seamlessly into energy efficiency programs.
But I quickly bumped up against the edge of what eQUEST was capable of doing.
There's a lot that's not to love. I mean, most notably, once you leave the wizard, there's no going back.
Editing, building geometry is incredibly painful in detail mode. You have the choice of editing polygons by editing individual vertex locations,
which is painstakingly slow and prone to errors. Or you can go back into wizard mode and sort of rebuild the geometry and try to merge that with your existing model,
or rebuild your model from scratch.
HVAC systems are pretty limited. A lot of modern system types are not implemented well in DO2 or in eQUEST.
There's a limit of one system per zone. Changing the HVAC system type can be quite confusing.
And modeling things like direct outdoor air systems requires some sort of extra workarounds.
I've also found that the plant loops and the water side to be a little bit oversimplified. It didn't allow enough flexibility.
Parametric analysis also was fairly oversimplified, and I found that for most of my projects, I needed to do a save as and then manage multiple projects in order to,
or manage multiple files in order to simulate the different energy efficiency measures that my clients needed.
And I also found that I was spending a lot of time post-processing data in spreadsheets.
In short, eQUEST is a really great tool for simple projects, but I quickly started bumping up against limitations.
And after a few years with eQUEST, I started researching other alternatives.
So I ended up deciding that I wanted to move to EnergyPlus. And here we go with EnergyPlus.
We've got the good, the bad, and the ugly. I really needed a program that could model more complex HVAC systems, and EnergyPlus can do that.
That's the good, but it comes with a lot of other stuff.
So the good side of EnergyPlus, we have a six-month development cycle. Bugs are addressed and new features are added.
It's open source, which means that you can, you have the option to contribute to EnergyPlus if you want to add a feature.
There are incredible options for HVAC system modeling. There's very well refrigerant flow, thermal energy storage, air-to-water heat pumps, loop-to-loop heat exchangers.
If you can build it in the real world, you can simulate it in some manner in EnergyPlus.
There are very detailed heat balance equations with appropriate time delay heat transfer for thermal mass building envelope components.
Very detailed outputs. The energy management also allows us to do exceptional calculation methods within EnergyPlus within the simulation time steps.
EnergyPlus is globally recognized. It's well documented, and it has all of the capabilities of Doe 2.2 plus a lot more.
So that's the good. The bad side is a super steep learning curve. I mean, it takes people years to learn EnergyPlus.
It's very time-intensive to set up and to model changes.
Simulation times for large and complex models are significantly longer than equest, although this has gotten a lot better in the past few years.
Complex models also means complex troubleshooting. It's not intuitive. There are a lot of redundant object types, and there are hundreds of different object types in EnergyPlus.
I think there's eight chiller types, for example. Well-documented also means that there are thousands of pages of documentation to comb through.
So this is a bit tongue-in-treak, but the ugly is the user interface that comes with EnergyPlus and the IDF editor.
So keep in mind that I'm talking about my experience. This is about 15 years ago when I decided to leave EQuest.
So now we have DesignBuilder, Trace3DPlus, and OpenStudio, but at the time those tools didn't exist or they were in their infancy,
or they didn't implement many of the EnergyPlus objects and features that I needed.
So once I started thinking about creating something on my own, I was really excited about having something where I didn't have to wait for someone else's development cycle.
I could implement something that I needed. And the conclusion that I drew was that EnergyPlus could do everything that I needed it to do.
I just needed a user interface where I could visualize the HVAC connections.
I was using SketchUp a lot for some personal projects, and I thought, you know, it's got an API. It's got a great drawing interface.
How hard could it possibly be?
Okay, so let's switch screens here and introduce EP3.
Okay, so introducing EP3. We actually used the first in-house version of EP3 in mid-2011.
We have some driving development philosophies behind EP3.
One is that each project should require only one file, with energy efficiency measures handled within that one file.
We wanted to leverage the power of SketchUp to make drawing building geometry easy.
Edits needed to be easy to make at any stage of the project. I didn't want this time's arrow, you know, you go from the wizard mode to detailed mode,
and all of a sudden things get really difficult. Things needed to be easy to manage throughout the project from start to finish.
HVAC system connections need to be made and displayed in a graphical user interface.
And I didn't want to hide the energy plus structure. I just wanted to make it easy to use and easy to understand.
And as a general philosophy, computers need to be doing the things that are easy for computers to do and leave humans to do the things that we want to do.
I mean, that's the idea of automation.
And also, importing energy plus files is just as important as exporting.
So I'm going to take you through a couple videos that show you some features of EP3, and we'll keep some of these driving philosophies and some of the really nice aspects of E-Quest in mind as we're looking at those videos.
So we have a wizard in EP3 that opens automatically anytime you create a new file.
You can select your energy plus version and select a weather file.
There are internal loads libraries that come with EP3, and we also support you in creating your own internal loads libraries.
All of this wizard is built on top of our IDF importer.
So this means that you can take portions of your old files, your old energy plus files if you have them, and create templates that can be used in the wizard.
So we have some preloaded construction templates. We also have some preloaded HVAC systems.
We're continuing to build these out, and as I said, you can create your own.
We have a really, really simple building geometry option in the wizard.
So we're just doing boxes, and in the next video, I'll show you how easy it is to create your own building geometry.
You can also see everything right now is in SI units that you can toggle back and forth between international and SI units.
So as part of the wizard, we expose the internal loads and give you some fields that you can edit if you want to, related to occupancy, lighting, electrical equipment.
The wizard is just thinking here for a second, and then we also have a section where you can apply HVAC systems to different zones.
So this is a user interface where you can just toggle them on and off.
And then here is our very simple box model, two stories, 10 zones.
And if you mouse over any zone in the dialogue, then you'll see the zone location in the 3D model.
HVAC system, I'll go over this a little bit more in more detail later, but this is your complete HVAC system.
As you zoom in, you get some more context clues and information about each object.
Selecting an object and viewing the dialogue, you can edit or look at data for any individual object.
See videos automatically starting over. Let's go to the next one.
Okay, so drawing and redrawing building geometry.
So this is what the building geometry editor looks like.
I've sped it up a little bit because we don't have a huge amount of time today.
But because this is SketchUp, you can import any sort of drawing or image to use as a background and trace over to create your zoning in EP3.
And if you look on the right, as I'm drawing the zones and the spaces, they all update automatically as I'm drawing.
So here I'm just drawing space outlines.
And I like to use the rectangle tool to quickly create some spaces, but you can use the line tool and create angled edges.
We're using a roof wizard to create a roof.
And this is SketchUp.
So I can subdivide the surface and push and pull edges or surfaces to make pitched roofs.
Walls are created by projecting the space outlines up to the roof surface or up to the next surface.
And when you need to make a change, you just go and you change it.
And then I can add, I can go and I can add new spaces.
So here I'm adding a couple of new spaces.
And when those spaces are complete, I will just project the walls up to the roof surface again and all of those intersections happen automatically.
So it's very, very easy to go through and make building geometry changes at any phase in your modeling journey.
Internal loads are driven by zone lists.
So if you're not familiar with energy plus, it's okay.
The general workflow that we suggest is that you set up a zone list, which is essentially a template for your internal loads.
And the zone list can automatically update based on the names of your spaces, which means that changing a space type is as simple as changing the name.
You don't have to do your workflow that way, but that's how we do it.
And it is an extremely efficient way to do, to run your workflow.
Okay.
Give a little overview of HVAC systems.
So we've just created some new, some new spaces.
Now we're going back to HVAC systems.
As you zoom in, you get some contacts clues.
On the right, we have our HVAC outliner, and it's organized by loop.
So when you mouse over a loop, it shows you the loop location.
If you mouse over a branch, it will show you the location of that branch, and it shows you how all of these different objects are connected.
We connect the HVAC system back to the building geometry by toggling on and off the zone HVAC equipment so we can attach multiple equipment to each zone.
For HVAC systems that are for zone HVAC equipment.
So we're looking right now at the direct outdoor air system, air terminal.
And up top, we see inputs for that general inputs for the air terminal.
And down below, you can see that it says replicated objects for the air terminal.
So each individual air terminal.
We can change an input for a general input, and it will update down below.
And you can change an input for a specific zone.
And if you refresh, you'll see that that one specific number that was changed.
It stays, we can have a specific input for a specific zone and then change general inputs that get applied everywhere.
So this kind of replaces that spreadsheet view that we have in E-class.
The spreadsheet view in E-class can be very, very handy to make large changes to your model.
However, in EP3, we have a format where we can propagate information intelligently through the model.
Okay, so everything we've done so far has been based on an IDF import.
I'm now going to show you how to overview of how to attach a new piece of equipment.
So we're going to bring in a package terminal air conditioner.
So again, this is based off of IDF import.
So we are importing an object that has all of the information that it needs to be simulated.
So it's connected to, it's coming in with the schedules that it needs.
It's, excuse me.
Okay, so it's coming with the schedules and any curves and any default inputs or required inputs.
These objects come in with everything filled out.
We can also choose the types of coils that we want to have.
So I've just switched it from an electric resistance coil to a water coil.
And now I'm using the connector tool to draw those connections.
We can then assign this PTAC to different zones.
One of the other driving factors with EP3 was keeping one file per project.
So I'll take you through a really brief introduction on how we manage efficiency measures.
So I'm adding an efficiency measure that's called R40 Roof.
And then you can switch up in the upper left to a different efficiency measure.
And once you've created your efficiency measure, all you do is you change the input value in the actual model.
You'll notice the background is red here.
That's indicating that this is an inherited value.
And after I change that value, if I refresh, now we can see that the background is white again.
And this means that this value is stored in this particular EEM.
So that's it. That's all you have to do to create an efficiency measure for an R40 Roof.
For HVAC systems, if you want to toggle equipment on and off, it's a little bit different.
So here we're setting up an efficiency measure for fan coils and another one for PTACs.
And then if you select the object, so this is the fan coil object,
I can manage the availability of this object in different EEMs.
So I can say in the PTAC option, I want it to be off and in the fan coil EEM, I want it to be on.
And I select the PTAC and I do the same. So it's off in the fan coil and it's on in the PTAC option.
And then when you switch EEMs, EP3 manages all of those connections and the equipment just appears and disappears.
We're going to the PTAC EEM and we want to make sure that the PTAC is actually connected to all our zones before we simulate.
But switching back and forth between efficiency measures, EP3 just handles those connections for you.
So we can simulate right within EP3 and when I go to simulate, you can see I have my base EEM and then the R40 fan coil and PTAC options available.
It takes a minute to translate from the EP3 format to IDF and you get a little update report as it goes.
And then the simulation happens automatically.
So as it's simulating, you can, as a simulation is happening, you can view and edit your model as normal.
So the EnergyPlus simulation does take a bit longer than E-Quest, but you can simulate multiple files at the same time.
So when the simulation is complete, the results dialogue will pop up.
In the upper left, we have access to all of the native EnergyPlus output files.
So IDF Editor, I'm sorry, the IDF, the output tables, RDD, and then we provide access to certain tables as well and we provide graphs for you.
And the graphs can be copied and pasted into reports for your clients.
I'm just going to go back here and show again that one of the things that we do is we include in these tables, we include all of the different energy efficiency measures, the outputs for the different efficiency measures,
and you have access to two different types of graphs and you can also export any individual table to a CSV file.
Stacking EEMs. So this is where things really start to get fun, is you can create multiple EEMs and mix and match.
So we're going to add two EEMs. One is a PTAC with R40 Roof and the other one is a fan coil with R40 Roof.
And if you go to change EEM bases, we can just click on and off some of those other EEMs.
So it's not linear. I found myself at E-Quest often having to add EEMs because you just had sort of one baseline EEM and you couldn't kind of pull one out of the middle.
So this means we can change and add and remove any efficiency measure to any other efficiency measure and any sort of combination order that we want to.
So we skipped over the simulation, but here we have the office PTAC R40 Roof and regular office PTAC results that we can take a look at.
Importing EnergyPlus files is a really big feature for EP3 and it's something that most of the other user interfaces can't do or can't do completely.
So we give an option to import IDF snippets. So this might be if you have a lighting object or a schedule or a material that you want to bring into your model, you can just paste it here.
We preload the EnergyPlus example files here and you can also import any IDF file using this button here.
So this is quite useful if you want to bring in, say, a project that was created on another platform if you needed to do quality control on somebody else's file.
If you wanted to, say, do a study and use an EnergyPlus example file or the PNNL prototype building models as a starting place for a study, you can do that using a graphical user interface with EP3.
So here we're just going to import the five zone air cooled model. It's a pretty small model, but it gives you an idea of what this looks like and what the capabilities are.
So it just takes a minute and then once the import is complete, there are two reports that will pop up.
So one is this import report and there's also an import errors and warnings report.
So the errors and warnings will let you know if there are things that EP3 is not yet capable of importing and the import report will tell you how things got translated.
So you can filter by object type, you can filter by name, you can filter by whether or not it was imported, and you can also export it to a CSV file if you need to store that information somewhere else.
We have our building geometry and we have our HVAC systems that got imported.
Okay, so that's a very, very quick dump of information about EP3 and I'd like to leave a lot of time for questions and to use some sort of live demonstrations and hear from you about how you want to use a tool that gives you access to EnergyPlus in a more friendly manner.
So I'm going to open it up to two questions.
There's a few questions if you see the Q&A, there's three in the queue right now and I think that you can handle them a lot better than I can.
Let's see, I'm going to get back to Doom somehow.
I can read the question here.
Yeah, go ahead.
This is a, they're all good questions actually. This one you'll enjoy.
Is EP3 accepted by USGBC and other officials?
Yes, so EP3 is, it's an EnergyPlus user interface. So the simulation engine is EnergyPlus and EnergyPlus is accepted by all of those organizations. So yes.
Okay, the next one.
What is the update frequency and does it support the new versions of EnergyPlus every time that one is released?
Just so you know, I had this exact same question.
Yeah, yeah, so we update EP3 in conjunction with the EnergyPlus release updates and to keep in mind that EP3 has been around in some format or another since 2011.
So we are quite good at keeping it up to date with EnergyPlus. It usually takes us about a day to update to the new versions of EnergyPlus.
In between, we sometimes release bug fixes or new features in between EnergyPlus release updates. So yes, so there's a very active development cycle.
Okay, yes, great. That was a surprising answer to me and impressive that it only takes a day.
Alright, let's see.
Is it possible to do mass modifications and do inputs based on text or Excel files? Okay, I get that.
So basically, yeah, you get it.
Okay, so mass modifications. Yes.
Actually, let me share my screen again here.
Show you one of the ways we do mass modifications.
Can you all see my screen? I feel like my view is quite messy at the moment.
I can see your screen.
Okay, so this is the five zone air cooled file that we imported from EnergyPlus.
And so let's say we want to modify the lighting power and we want to do it for all of these objects.
So I can select all of them and I can change the lighting power and it will ask me do I want to change this value for all of these selected objects and I click yes.
So yeah, you can do mass updates.
Same with the HVAC systems.
Instead of selecting them in this dialogue, you would just have the actual object selected.
So you can do mass updates.
Inputs based on a text or Excel file.
It's not happening yet, but you're not the first person to ask about that. So that will definitely be coming.
But not quite yet.
Okay, I'm going to try to ask the technical questions first.
Okay, see.
And then there's a few questions on kind of administrative things.
This actually is a really good question and it's a E-quest user and unsure of the questions.
But do I need to have EnergyPlus as well in order to install EP3?
So I guess the question is how do you install it?
Yes, so EP3 is a SketchUp extension.
So you need to have SketchUp and then you install EP3 and it works with SketchUp.
You also need to have EnergyPlus installed, but if you don't have EnergyPlus installed,
EP3 will take you directly to the EnergyPlus website where you can download it and it takes you through that process as well.
So it's not currently packaged with EP3.
At some point in the future, maybe it will be, but right now it's not.
Okay, yeah. And everyone asking administrative questions about licensing and pricing,
I think there's a number of questions on that.
I think we should cover the technical questions first and then we'll get into that.
So anyone asking if they missed it? No, you did not miss that.
This one, I think I know the answer is which weather file format does it take?
I'd imagine that would be an EPW.
Yes, it's the EnergyPlus EPW format.
Okay.
I'm just closing out the questions that...
Oh, it's a good one.
Does EP3 have built-in ASHRAE 90.1 templates?
And how does EP3 compare to Trace 3D Plus as they both use EnergyPlus Engine?
Well, that's two questions.
Yeah. So the first one is the ASHRAE baseline generator is in development.
We have the lighting and the envelope complete, but we have to do the HVAC systems and domestic hot water portion.
It's coming, but it's not quite there yet.
However, it sounds like the templates are available for walls and windows and things like that.
So there are templates.
If you're using the wizard, we have the baseline ASHRAE required templates for constructions,
but you still have to manually assign those constructions in EP3.
We are working on getting the baseline generator finished, but it's not quite there yet.
We want to make sure it's right before we release it.
How does it compare to Trace 3D Plus?
Trace 3D Plus and DesignBuilder and some of the other ones.
You know, I've had EP3 since 2011, so I'm not an expert on those systems.
However, I think one of the defining factors of EP3 is that we really have tried to keep it here at EnergyPlus.
Some of the other software, they have other things layered on top of it such as their own kind of proprietary data structure.
Trace is quite involved with HVAC system sizing, and so the different approaches, they have different pros and cons.
So EP3, I think we are quite, the simulations are very, very fast because we're not adding anything on top of EnergyPlus.
It also allows us to do the import because we haven't changed the data structure at all.
So those are the ways that I know that it's different, but keep in mind that I haven't used these other tools in a very long time.
So this next question is along the same line, so I'm going to jump to that one.
What in your mind are the main advantages over OpenStudio?
I think definitely the EEM functions went over, but does anything else come to mind?
My first take is that as an OpenStudio user, I personally like OpenStudio.
I do think that EP3 is much more intuitive, and it works directly with EnergyPlus, and obviously Karen would know a lot more about that.
Yeah, that's a good question, and it's quite interesting to me to watch the development of OpenStudio because EP3 was developed in private,
but along the same timeline as OpenStudio, and their approach is very, very different.
I think that one of the things is OpenStudio was not originally intended to be this user interface.
It's sort of designed, it's kind of half an user interface, and it's half kind of middleware between other user interfaces and OpenStudio.
So it adds a lot of complexity that is maybe not necessary for energy modeling.
I think it's quite difficult to do sweeping changes and change multiple things all at the same time in OpenStudio.
OpenStudio can import certain things from EnergyPlus, but not other things.
I don't think OpenStudio can import complete HVAC systems.
The biggest is the approach to efficiency measures.
OpenStudio relies very much on scripting, so you have a high-quality script and a high-quality measure, then that works.
My experience with doing hundreds of energy models is that every project is different, and there's actually not that much more complicated stuff that I can reuse from one product to another.
You can get 90, 95% of the way there with standard stuff, and then you spend most of your time doing tweaky little editing bits with all the different parts
and pieces that are non-standard.
So EP3 is really designed to be fast, even if the project is sort of non-standard.
Yeah, and just what I would add to that is that you mentioned middleware, and OpenStudio is basically a second language that speaks to the EnergyPlus engine,
where EP3 speaks directly to the EnergyPlus engine.
And to me, that is, depending on how you look at it, that's probably an advantage.
In some cases where if you're making a third layer on your own user interface,
maybe that's more what OpenStudio was designed to do, to operate as a translator from official software to EnergyPlus.
Correct me if I'm wrong, Karen. I think that's one of the answers we're looking for.
Yeah, I think Bob, I think you're right.
I think one of the other things is that my primary role in my career has been as an energy modeler.
So EP3 is really designed by somebody who's been doing energy modeling for 18 years.
I'm intimately aware of the process of the projects, and keeping it in-house and small for a long time has meant that we've been able to do fairly large changes when they're necessary,
whereas OpenStudio and anything that's sort of public facing early on, they get a little bit more locked into a structure and a framework,
and a lot of their resources are spent serving their customers and clients rightly slow instead of making adjustments.
So I think one of the really big advantages of EP3 is that it's been in-house and it's been tested and it's been run through so many different projects that the workflow is quite refined.
Yes, and right in line with that question, Cherie picked this one next.
Has EP3 been tested with exports and imports from different software?
For example, an IDF exported from HAP or TRACE, is it usable in EP3?
And then it also ties into someone else's question, what about Revit exports such as IFC or GVXML?
Yeah, okay, so good questions.
We are, you know, IDF is IDF, it doesn't really matter who it comes from.
We do see certain types of things coming from different types of user interfaces.
For example, I noticed that certain design builder files, there can be micro changes in the 3D coordinates and some surfaces that we need to adjust for.
So, you know, the more files that we get from more different sources, the better EP3 gets.
But yeah, we've tested it on a bunch of different source files.
We also, one of the ways that we've tested the import functionality is by doing a straight import, export and simulate and comparing the results from the original file to the simulated file.
And we're expecting them to be the same. And so we have a pretty good list of energy plus example files where we've achieved that.
So yeah, so it's been tested quite a lot with different software.
But we do encourage you to take a look at those import reports and make sure that things are coming in the way that you want them to.
Because there is so much variety and energy plus is so big that covering 100% is we're not there yet.
I'm not sure anybody would get to 100% perfect IDF import.
So along the same lines of that question, I'm just trying to go with the flow here is can EP3 import PNNL models with complete HVAC?
Yeah, yeah, we've been importing complete PNNL models with complete HVAC and run them through that test of import, export, simulate.
Yep.
I think I didn't, I didn't answer the last question about Revit files.
Oh, yes, yes.
Yeah, no, we're not currently importing GBXML.
I think there, you know, if you wanted to have Revit file and bring it into EP3, there are other sort of ways to translate from GBXML to IDF and then you could you could pull it in using IDF, but we're not importing GBXML.
Yeah, you could probably go through a third party to generate the IDF geometry from GBXML.
That process in and of itself is its own science importing from Revit into a GBXML.
And if you have that process down good, you can, you can get a really nice geometry.
It doesn't necessarily work out of the box in my experience. So if you can do that well, I'm sure that you can convert the format pretty efficiently.
Yeah, our philosophy, you know, there are a lot of people out there.
For example, oh, what's the, what's the one I'm blanking on the name, but there are a couple of Sketchup plugins that are also energy simulation related that do their best to interpret native Sketchup geometry.
And we started that way with EP3 and fairly quickly abandoned it because the geometry that's created for an architectural model and the geometry that you need for an energy model are fairly different.
And that simplification, I think we're just getting there with machine learning where a machine might have the intelligence to actually make that translation and recognize that closets are not in fact in fact zones.
They should just be part of the spaces that they're in. We don't need to see all of the walls for every single closet.
The space that exists between the exterior surface of a wall and the interior surface of a wall, that is, that is not a volume that is part of the construction.
So there's a lot of simplification that happens between an architectural model and an energy model. And our philosophy has been, we're going to hold your hand and make it really easy to draw a very,
very clean model and we're going to make it easy for you to edit and modify that model as you need to and not really bother with the import.
So even very complex building geometry we can generally create in an hour or two.
Speaking of complex models, I'm scrolling through the questions here and I saw something.
Okay, can you speak to a model that has dozens if not hundreds of spaces and zones? Is there a mass processing?
I'm not sure exactly what's meant by mass processing.
There is a small slowdown for a lot of zones and larger models, but there are a couple of calculations that happen under the hood that are kind of expensive.
And we cache that data and then reuse the results when we have to do sort of mass processing.
So, yeah, you'll notice in a very, very large model that it will slow down a little bit, but it is, I think, you know, I had a user with the file the other day that's, you know, over 100 zones, maybe 150 zones and the file was running just fine.
So, yeah.
Okay, there's a bunch of questions.
Yeah, I was confused about exactly what was meant by mass processing.
So I'm glad that I wasn't just missing out on some term relative to EP3.
So the next question, just total change of ACE here.
Excuse me.
Is there a possibility to control the charge in the ACE HP systems in EP3?
Control the charge. What do you, what is meant by?
I'm guessing that's how much refrigerant.
Okay.
Yeah, so we have exposed the different energy plus models for cooling coils.
Energy plus has some models for cooling coils that are based on, based on efficiency and curves, just like an equest.
And you can create your own curves.
There are also some models, which to be honest, I don't think they've gotten a lot of attention from the energy plus development team in the last five or 10 years.
So, but there are certain models in energy plus where you can specify the detailed kind of charge and the specific parameters of the refrigeration system.
And we give you access to that.
So yes, you can.
Okay, good. I wasn't sure the exact answer on that.
Okay, I'm just closing these out.
Okay, there's two questions that are similar and the answers are probably not exact, but are there plans for title 24 and then does it make lead easier?
It's sort of in the same, the same compliance question.
Yep.
We don't currently have plans for title 24. I'd love to do it, but at the moment it does not seem to be, if I see there's a large market meeting for it, then we'll consider it, but no, not at the moment.
For as far as lead is concerned, we're working on that ASHRAE baseline generator, so it's coming.
I think that it makes lead easier because it allows me to model the buildings without having to do post-processing and justify exceptional calculation methods, which I was having to do quite a lot with other software.
And I would add that the inputs are quick and also it updates very quickly when you need to manually update the inputs for lead anyway.
So for example, subbing out all the walls and windows and the LPDs is something that can be done rather quickly.
Right, yeah.
And then of course you have the tool that you're working on and I've seen some screenshots of that.
So it's under development and I think there's decent process, decent progress made on that.
So, however, without that, I still think that the updates would be a lot faster than updating an EQuest model, for example.
Absolutely, yeah.
Okay, so, okay, I'm trying to close these up.
I guess this question is, is it available for residential use and ground source heat pumps?
Yeah, so I feel like energy plus is sort of end use agnostic.
I've modeled things as small as just the energy required to make, you know, I modeled, I think that the smallest project ever was a exhaust hood.
A study about exhaust hoods.
I mean, it was like a square meter space, essentially, and we were just looking at different ways to control exhaust hoods in a lab to maximize safety and minimize energy.
So energy plus, it doesn't care if it's residential or non residential.
The libraries that we provide, we were providing libraries for residential constructions and for residential internal loads and schedules.
So yeah, if you want to do residential with it, you absolutely can.
So what was the second part of the question?
Was it heat pumps?
Yes, heat pumps.
Yes.
Yes.
Water to air heat pumps, geothermal heat pumps, that's all supported.
Okay.
Yeah.
So see, we're down to about seven minutes left on here and maybe transition some of these questions.
I appreciate everyone attending, by the way, and everyone holding on for these questions.
That's, that's great.
And I appreciate it.
The next one is getting into licensing.
Someone asked, does it matter which version of SketchUp we use?
It does.
Yeah, we're currently supporting SketchUp 2024.
Up until last year, I was supporting the old version of SketchUp, SketchUp 2017, but there have been so many bug fixes and usability updates and changes that we're no longer supporting the free version of SketchUp.
And I mean, we're actually not supposed to be using the free version for commercial work anyway.
So yeah, so we're supporting SketchUp 2024.
And great.
Yeah.
Okay.
I think we, I really appreciate the questions.
These are always the most valuable part of any presentation.
So let's see what we can get to this question.
I just like this question and then maybe we'll get into some of the licensing.
Is it possible to visualize hourly results for HVAC objects within this environment?
Let's see.
What do I have for, yeah.
So, you know, at one point we considered adding some information right on the screen here and letting you scroll through a time period and see, and see temperatures on right in the HVAC diagram.
But let me actually add something here.
This is a node reporting object.
So if I report hourly and I can add node reports to different locations.
And then when we simulate, we'll do a quick simulation here.
When we simulate, we can then look at output reports.
We have hourly output reports visualizer right within EP3.
And you can actually do calculations on your hourly or time step data and visualize that with a graph in EP3.
We don't have it visualized in the diagram.
It's something that we thought about and I don't think it's honestly super.
I don't think it's actually all that useful.
But here we have our list of information.
But yeah, we can just quickly add a couple of these.
And you could visualize this in Excel anyway.
You can also visualize this in Excel.
One of the things that probably takes a little bit too long here.
But one of the things here that you can do is you can give these pieces of data like an alias and run a calculation on it and then rerun the model and save that information and rerun the calculation.
So two minutes isn't really enough time to fully explain.
But this is really, really useful for, say, validating custom curves and making sure that your efficiency output is correct based on the environment conditions for that particular curve.
So you can run the calculation and see it on a graph right within EP3.
Okay, and then people are going to have to start going and there is a number of questions on availability and cost and licensing and if there's an academic license and all of that.
Do you wish to speak to that or do you wish to refer them to your web page or that I'm going to leave that entirely up to you?
Okay, I think what I'd like to do is follow up with an email that provides some details about pricing.
And I will say yes, we do have a heavily discounted academic license.
And is it immediately available, I think, is some of the other questions?
Yes, it is immediately available.
We are pacing ourselves as far as onboarding new users because our priority is to provide really high quality support.
So right now it's available.
If we get a big bubble of users, you might have to wait a little bit.
So but our goal is to make sure that when you sign on, you will have really high quality support to get you going and get you using EP3.
Okay, and then I like this question and I think Karen is going to like this question.
Does EP3 support Python scripting?
Well, Python scripting, okay.
Can we get a little bit of clarification on what sort of Python scripting they're asking after?
Because there are a couple of different things.
We can do essentially energy management with energy plus using a Python script, which EP3 supports,
but we don't have any special, you know, we haven't added any special extra features in order to support that,
but it's a part of energy plus and we support those objects.
We are considering in the future offering an API, which would let you make sweeping changes to the model using scripting.
However, that would not be in Python, that would probably be in Ruby, not Python.
So it's not supported yet, but we'll see what the demand is like.
However, I really encourage you before you're saying, oh, I really need spreadsheets or I need scripting,
I really encourage you to get into EP3 and just try it out because there are a lot of things that I used to need spreadsheets and scripting for
that I don't anymore because of the way that EP3 is structured.
All right, great. I thought that question had some creativity involved in it.
Let's see. Yeah, so we have a bunch and people are hanging on so they must be interested.
Let me just say people can stay and keep listening to questions and I'm happy to keep answering them, but for people who have to go,
we're going to send out a little follow up email with a survey and I just would ask you to fill that out.
I'm just curious. We're planning an EP3 slash energy plus training and I'm just kind of curious what sorts of things you all want to learn about energy plus and EP3
and is your primary goal to learn energy plus? Do you see EP3 as a valuable learning tool or are you excited about EP3 in and of itself?
So let's keep going with questions, but for anybody who has to drop off, please look for that follow up and I'd really appreciate your responses.
We are recording this and we should make that survey the mandatory entry fee for obtaining that recording so that we can produce a second round that's more specific for the training.
Fantastic.
Alright, do you want to give me some more questions?
Yeah, yeah, there's so many.
There was one that I really liked and then I just scroll past it.
Something about can we input air flows line by line?
Input air flows line by line.
For example, I think is there a way to enter different flow rates for each zone on a several hundred zone building?
So I imagine that would be if you had a bunch of fan flow units of different sizes and an example and you, you know, one home's 500, one of them's 1500 and so on.
Yeah, yeah, you absolutely can.
So I think I went a little bit fast on this and the presentation portion.
I'll go through this a little bit slower.
But here is an is an air terminal, the space.
It's called Space 1 VAV Reheat.
It's actually applied to all the spaces, but the naming got a little bit changed on import.
And if we go to the selected object information, we see we have all of this sort of all these inputs, which are common.
All this information is common among the five zones that it's applied to.
So here we have replicated objects for this reheat air terminal and we can go through and we can make changes to each individual object.
For a project with hundreds of zones, I think this is one of these places where having a spreadsheet where you can just drop a spreadsheet in and you say, this is the sizing for Space 1 and this is the sizing for Space 2 and this is the sizing for Space 3.
And I think that sounds like a fun challenge.
It's not actually a huge axe to implement that.
So yeah, I would say that that that is something that's coming in.
And if whoever asks this question, when you sign up and purchase a license of EP3, part of that process is us having sitting down and having a conversation and me learning about how you want to use EP3.
And I get excited about supporting users who have a specific need.
And so yeah, a lot of my users, they said, hey, is it possible to do X, Y and Z?
And if it's a not a huge ask those things get implemented pretty quickly.
If the ask is, can you completely redevelop EP3 and make it free on a free platform?
That's not going to happen.
But smaller things like I want to be able to change 400 zones using a spreadsheet that is doable.
Yes.
Yeah, and I will say so far, I've had a number of questions and all of the questions have been answered thoroughly and with nice precision, where I can see that Karen has a lot of experience with this and energy modeling.
And also, I have a question and some of her answers are, well, actually, there's a better way to do that.
So I can vouch for her ability to answer questions there.
Next question here is, can we simulate refrigerated systems as refrigerated warehouse with EP?
There is some limitations for stimulate, there's a type of limitation for simulate some systems as VRF, geothermal or others.
Let's stick to the first half of that question.
Can we simulate refrigerated systems as refrigerated warehouse?
Yeah, I think it's sort of such as refrigerated warehouses.
So energy plus supports refrigeration systems.
We're kind of nominally supporting that and it embarrassingly at the moment sort of looks like the IDF editor.
I would like to create a beautiful graphical user interface like we have here for refrigeration systems, but it's not a big part of a lot of projects and so it's not high on the priority list at the moment.
So yes and no.
We can do it, but it's not as simple and beautiful and easy as the general HVAC systems.
As far as as VRF and geothermal, we support everything that the energy plus supports.
So the only limitations there are energy plus limitations.
In a similar token to that question just functionality.
Do you support airflow network and general natural ventilation modeling?
And then about what is the results of human like for those calculations?
Yeah, so we're not currently supporting airflow network.
It's a niche market like refrigeration.
It's very very niche.
It's very very niche and it's very complex to support and we've decided that that is not worth the effort at the moment.
So again, if there's if there's a huge market demand and we can get compensated for the development work that goes into that, then we would consider it at the moment.
It's it's too niche of a market.
Makes sense.
Okay, so just everyone asking about pricing.
Just check your email.
We will have an email list of all the attendees and we can send that to those people and then also it will not be done today.
I usually like to edit the recording to make it to make it a little faster and to break it into parts.
We'll get to recording.
And so just be on the lookout for some things but please don't fill up the inbox today asking for it.
I could just release the raw recording.
It's not that simple though, because you have to change formats and clip out the first 15 minutes when I was logged in, etc.
Let's see.
A lot of these are redundant.
Well, anyway, Karen, great job.
Great job presenting and with the tool.
Thank you.
So far, I'm very impressed and I'm actually not very easily impressed.
So I hope that the audience here can note some of these things and just their natural role for energy modelers that are directly modeling all of these little nuances on every single model.
Okay, what is
I think we have there's a few technical questions in here that but there's there's some intermingled
and somewhat redundant.
So I think that that's everything.
We'll have the question list and I'm sure Karen will love to go over that.
As you can see she's dedicated to the software and I appreciate everyone attending.
Look for a follow up webinar where we will do some training on on EP3 specifically as opposed to a general overview.
Thank you everyone.
Thank you so much and thank you so much Bob for having me as a as a guest presenter.
It's been a real pleasure.
Yeah, yeah, so glad so glad you reached out.
Thank you.
All right.
Yeah, everyone have a great day and holiday season.
And we'll probably be back next month sometime.
January and 2025.
In the meantime, we'll do our best to get back to you on these questions.
Yeah.
So we'll send out an email and they'll be a link to the website.
If you want to demo, we'll also include a requested demo link as well there.
So yeah, thank you.
All right, I think that as the host you are you can end the webinar at any time.
Okay.
End the webinar.
There we go.
Thank you everyone.
Thank you.
Bye bye.
Bye.