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...

TRACE 700 is unique Building simulation software - Especially since it does both load calculations and energy modeling.  There's a lot of people that use TRACE 700 to do a lot of different things: Load Design, LEED models, Life Cycle payback, just to name a few. 

Did you know that TRACE 700 is over 2 million lines of Code? TRACE 700 is incredibly complex and has computational power that far exceeds anything you can do on a spreadsheet!

So, depending on your job title -  you may or may not use certain features of the program. For example, maybe you need to interface with GLHE pro for sizing Geothermal wells (TRACE 700 can do this, and more!), but maybe you don't

In my travels, training...

As energy modeling grows worldwide, the demand for international weather has grown. eQUEST - being so popular, has a lot of weather locations, but a modeler often needs more.

A lot of you want to edit the weather, or create your own weather files and this can be done with our handy weather editor (so long as you have nearby area to start from). But, a lot of you (eQUEST/DOE2 users) need to convert your .epw weather to .bin data - which we can do here

Energyplus has a large set of international weather, but it must be converted to .BIN format. This process is easy, but there is a slight glitch in the initial install. Check out this video to see how...

Many of you ask about trends in energy-modeling, or if energy-modeling is on the rise. For those who ask, you probably already know, and are just looking for confirmation. Yes, Energy-modeling is becoming more and more important for several reasons. You can see these reasons below, but first, let's validate the claim that energy-modeling is on the rise.

Proof of this, is that the latest ASHRAE Journal headlined "Energy-Modeling - Making Good Assumptions", in a very well written article on the topic. (Also, thanks for mentioning energy-models.com/forum!).

When ASHRAE does something, everybody else follows. Sure, we hear a lot about USGBC, GBCI, and LEED, and so on... BUT none of those organizations operate without ASHRAE (...