A common viewpoint for HVAC engineers is that eQuest is a great modeling tool but CANNOT be used for loads. Designers will typically use an additional tool more targeted to loads or may do all load calculations in a spreadsheet. However, it may surprise some, but eQUEST calculates loads before it calculates energy. In fact, eQUEST MUST calculate loads in order to calculate energy.

Consider the many pieces of information entered in an eQUEST model: Occupancy loads, equipment, geometry , envelope properties, and so on. These parameters determine building loads as well, and eQUEST does just that - quickly and accurately calculates building loads. The main problem with using eQUEST for loads is that the bulk of the reporting focuses on energy (which is great for energy calculations of course). eQUEST’s summary reports for loads are unfortunately all but convoluted.  Energy-models.com provides a free tool to quickly grab load design information in the .SIM file and delivers it in both a table and excel format.

While the Energy-models.com LOAD EXTRACTOR will return the calculated loads in a .SIM file, it does not check for the quality of your inputs or verify the accuracy of your loads (User proficiency is assumed). Here are some key recommendations for when using eQuest to calculate loads:

1. Make sure that all occupancy, lighting, equipment, and envelope inputs are absolutely correct! And use conservative numbers.
2. Set all fractional schedules that represent loads within the building (lighting, equipment, occupancy) to 1.0 all the time. (to prevent mistakenly lowered loads)
3. Use layered constructions rather than U-Value input. The former takes into account thermal mass while the latter does not. (This could cause your peak load to occur at a different time of day!)
4. Create design days in the detailed interface. (On "Project and Site" tab Right click Project and click "Create Design Day"). Set the start date and range of your design days to cover 6 months or more to ensure you are capturing all the options for solar angles.
5. While eQuest is a great tool for space loads, only experienced users should consider using eQuest to size systems. The likelihood of error for space loads is much less than the likelihood for system sizing. OA, system controls, and other factors, such as Peak vs. Block calculations among a plethora of other factors make system sizing exponentially more complex than space load calculations. 

Also, don’t worry about privacy. Your .SIM file is deleted after the information is extracted. We also have a strict privacy policy and will only look