Over-aggressive or Over-passive driving wastes gas in both your car and other drivers. When you make people hit the brakes, they consume additional gas. If you cause a traffic jam, even more. Remember to use your turn signals! That way, other people can make appropriate...
Energy Modeling Blog
Posted on: Oct 6, 2010
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While this website focuses mostly on commercial buildings, I want to take a moment looking at the bigger theme and discuss my top 5 ways you can easily make an immediate impact on world energy savings. This article has to do with simply changing your behavior, and no worries - there will be no lecture on recycling (I assume you are doing this already, if not for the environment, for the local economy)
Drive properly. Don’t drive like an idiot.
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Posted on: Oct 5, 2010
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How does ice storage help me save me money, save energy, and earn LEED points?
There are a lot of good reasons. This article focuses on a few of the main red flags telling you to get your butt in gear and get some ice tanks. And, if LEED is important to you, we will talk about how ice storage can yield big LEED points.
But before we talk about ice storage, let’s start with an ice-breaker: What is the number one reason to use ice storage? Now, if you said 'to save energy', you are WRONG. Would it surprise you to know that reducing energy consumption is not the most common reason to use ice storage?. The real reason to use ice storage is that IT SAVES EVEN MORE MONEY THAN IT SAVES IN ELECTRICITY. Example: you can "charge"...
Filed under: energy modelingLEEDtechnicalTRACE 700
Posted on: Oct 1, 2010
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A common energy modeling question is: Why did my VAV minimum go up when I added max z ratio in Trace 700? And why is the heating ventilation greater when using std 62?
This is a common issue when running standard 62, as it is a natural consequence of the calculations. I think it is best to walk through an example:
Take room a room where the ventilation requirement is 1 person * 5 cfm/person + .06 cfm/sqft*203 sqft = 17 cfm of ventilation in cooling.In heating, it requires 17/.8 = 21 cfm of ventilation (since the htg ez is set to 80% under the airflows tab).The space load requires 105 cfm at the space cooling peak.And the total system supply is 7337.In order to calculate the rooms critical %OA, we need to consider it's... Filed under: technical
Posted on: Sep 21, 2010
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If you are an energy-modeler or work with one, you have probably wondered if all this extra work is worth the effort. When doing energy models, it seems like you spend more time and money on the model than it could ever be worth, but it only seems that way. Remember, buildings last a long time and they consume about 30% of the energy used in the United States. In other words, energy models pay dividends.
So, the first thing to establish is this: What is the purpose of energy-modeling? Most people will tell you, “It’s to save energy”, but that is over-simplified. Some people will even argue that it does not save energy since it is almost always a ton of work and in fact costs energy. These people are wrong. In the...
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Posted on: Aug 3, 2010
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We are a full service energy consulting firm, specializing in energy-modeling. Our software of choice is TRACE 700. We also use Equest, EnergyPlus, DesignBuilder and several others.
Our experience leaves us with the ability to support, train, and troubleshoot your energy-modeling problems, saving you time and money.
Although it may not always be in the best interest of our business, we believe in sharing information and advancing energy-modeling with the hope that someday we can help design cost effective Net-zero buildings. In the meantime, we hope to establish a community of energy-modelers.
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