If you wanted to know how much energy extra insulation saved, the most accurate way to do this would be to build two identical buildings and put extra insulation in one of them.
That would be very expensive and would only provide an answer for that exact building in that exact location.
Energy modeling allows you to do this virtually, which isn’t very expensive. Create a building on the computer, then make a copy of it and edit one variable. Run the simulation. Get results. Done.
In fact, I have done insulation case studies many times. The most amazing part is that the results are often counter-intuitive:
In my favorite example, a designer was going to spend an additional 1 million dollars to add extra insulation to a building in Denver Colorado, but they wanted to estimate what the payback was.
They called me and since they were on a deadline, they had me do a mockup of the building while they remained on the phone (it took 30 minutes start to finish).
I created two buildings, one with R-25 insulation, and one with R-50 insulation (translation: “one with good insulation, and one with a heck of a lot insulation”).
I ran the simulation and was almost embarrassed to read the results:
The building where we spent an additional (thankfully virtual) million dollars used MORE energy than the building with less insulation.
This did require some expertise to explain the results. I will spare you the complexities, of which were all considered.
Now, I only use insulation as a simple example to show the power of energy modeling for decision making.
Such decisions impact both your upfront cost and the life cycle energy of the building.
When used to make proper decisions, energy modeling saves you a lot of energy. In this case, it saved several thousand dollars per year.
By the way, you can do simple energy calculations like this TODAY. There are various software packages where you can do these calculations, but the most popular (and also FREE) software to do this is eQUEST.
The only caution I would have for you: if you have not gone through training on eQUEST, stick to the Schematic Design Wizard.
In the next email, we are going to decide if you can do an energy model yourself, if you should do the model with a help of a friend, or if you should get someone else to do it!