I saw this quote on a bumper sticker the other day: "A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step" 

It's not a new quote to me but for some reason-perhaps because the weather was nearly 100 degrees (which is rare in Wisconsin)- I had a flashback to a Wednesday morning drive to work at Trane CDS, supporting TRACE 700 (it was a really hot summer)

At the time, I only had a month or so of experience and I remember having anxiety a few mornings on my way to work because I had realized that even though we did not make decisions for our customers, people were making BIG decisions based off of the energy-models that I had supported. I had yet to complete my Trane Graduate Training program, and while I was savvy...

Just installed the full version of eQUEST, a free building simulation program and now it wants a registration code? No, you didn't accidentally download spyware. It's likely that you might not have correct permissions in Windows for the default install. You'll get a prompt that looks something like this:

Don't bother entering your software registration code! This is indicative of a larger problem that needs a full solution.

To solve this error (takes 5-10 minutes)

One of the most common complaints a client (or an energy modeler) vocalizes is that the energy model does not match up with the existing utility rates. 

It seems that no matter how much you explain that the % savings stays the same regardless of an exact match on utility bills - the client won't believe you, until he or she sees the utility bills matching with the energy model output.

I've heard this question a lot... That's probably an understatement. As a result, I found that I was able to solve mis-matched models based on a "gut feeling". However, one day I decided to write down my thought process to obtain this "gut feeling" and realized that there was a method I was using, based on seeing thousands of energy-...

So you want to model a heat pump in TRACE 700? And in reality, you have no backup heat... Or maybe you have backup heating, but you know it will never operate because you have an enormous geothermal well.

Regardless, of the scenario, there's a few key features to modeling heat pumps in TRACE 700. (There's probably several dozen main components - but lets look at a few tips).

Keys to Modeling a heat pump in TRACE 700:

1) Create a backup heating plant (this should actually be your first step). You should technically have 1 backup heat plant for each cooling plant (even if in reality - this never operates). Do not set the capacity to zero - regardless of what you have heard in the past. See, if you set...