Hello everyone,

This is my first time using eQUEST and I'd like to have some advice about my project. I've tried a lot of things during the past few days on the software but didn't achieve what I was looking for. I've read plenty of threads in order to understand the eQUEST tricks but yet again I didn't find exactly what I was looking for.

So basically, my building is located in Montreal, QC so -20F in winter, 88F in summer for design temperatures. On the first floor, there is a bank, 3 retail stores and a restaurant. Each of them is supplied with water from the main plant. The bank has its own air system and the others have fan coils (they are not the main concern for the modeling). The next 6 floors consists of offices spaces with corridors/washrooms/elevators. I don't have much information about lighting, equipements and occupancy so I used ASHRAE standards values for each zone. The offices spaces are ventilated by induction unit (perimeter) related to a two-pipe loop.

The problem rises when modeling the water side HVAC. 2 heat pumps are connected to the two-pipe loop and a condenser loop. On the condenser loop, there are geothermal vertical fields but not enough to provide sufficient heat rejection for summer peak loads. 3 dry-coolers are connected to the condenser loop to provide the additionnal heat rejection. For winter peaks, 2 HW condensing boiler provide additionnal heat to the loop.

So far I've noticed two main problems: I cannot attach a dry-cooler device to a lake/well loop (geothermal fields) or a heat pump and the boilers generate heat not matter what the heat pump capacity is, resulting in an astronomic space heating consumption in gas.

For the boilers, I created a hot water loop connected to baseboards and with a schedule that supply hot water depending on outdoor air temperature. But for the dry-coolers, I didn't manage to simulate them correctly.

What should I model in order to represent my building correctly?

Thanks in advance,

Fred