20th Anniversary Attempt at Humor

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I am a firm believer in the KISS principle. I also favor function over form.

Creating an extremely complex energy model to compare against a baseline that has no bearing on reality seems a bit silly to me. Especially when the modeling software doesn?t include the functionality to model the proposed design (DOAS serving compartment fans serving series fan powered boxes that have a dual-max control strategy). You have to use a work-around anyway so why not use a modeling software that will run in 4 minutes vs. one that takes 23 hours because you decided to through in a few EMS controls but you didn?t take time to program an EMS to model the humification as control as designed.

Christopher R Jones, P.Eng.
T+ 1 416-644-0252

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I agree totally with Christopher.

Related to John's comment about making EnergyPlus as easy to use as eQUEST,? I've just had
an experience with EnergyPlus modeling that backs up John's concerns.? For a paper I'm
writing comparing the attic modeling in various programs, I needed to update an old
EnergyPlus residential model developed 4 years ago to a more current version.? After
struggling for a day running the IDFVersionConverter (which by the way runs over 20 times
for each version of EnergyPlus - clearly the developers had no concern with backward
compatibility of input files), I got a modified IDF file that didn't run because of an
input error about the nodes! Instead trying to debug that (anyone experienced with
EnergyPlus will tell you that the System Loops are very hard to debug),? I then asked a
colleague at LBNL if he had a working residential file, which he graciously sent me.?
However, when I looked at that file, I started to feel queasy because it was over 3,000
lines long!? Just for a rectangular 1-zone (well actually 2-zone because there is an
attic...) model ?

Joe

Joe Huang
White Box Technologies, Inc.
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