DX vs. Chilled Water: Unrealistic cooling loads

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Hi all,

I am working on a model of a building that is on a district cooling and heating loop. My baseline building is System type #3 (Constant Volume DX, Fossil Fuel Furnace) and I am simulating the district plant in the proposed using an air-cooled chiller with the plant efficiency for cooling and a boiler with the plant efficiency for heating.

I was having trouble with the cooling electrical consumption in the proposed model being much larger (by a factor of 10) larger than the cooling in the baseline model, which doesn't make sense. After a lot of fruitless "tweaking", I took the baseline model and just changed the system type from a "packaged single zone" (DX) to the system type "Variable Air Volume." I didn't change anything else (except for some of the settings that reverted back to defaults when I changed the system type). The cooling electrical consumption went from 160,000 kWh (baseline, pkgd single zone) to 1,400,000 kWh (VAV, chilled water). The EIR for the DX equipment is about the same as the EIR for the chiller.

I don't understand why the program is doing this. Has anyone run into this before? If so, what did you do to bring the cooling down to a more reasonable number? The same thing is also happening on the heating side, but I'm hoping if someone has an answer for the CHW side, then I can apply the same theory to the HW. Thanks in advance for your help.

Kristy Walson

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Here are the pd2 and inp files for anyone who can shed some light on this. I feel like I must be missing something that's probably obvious to someone who hasn't been looking at this for hours. Thanks!

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I haven't had a chance to look at your files, but my first guess would be to check that you put the correct chiller and boiler sizes in. MBTU is 1,000,000. I have seen this mistake made quite a bit.

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