Let's say we're working on a second LEED building, and we've already done LEED buildings before on this computer. We've done things like create the VAV curve. Here we have another VAV building. Let's say we want that 90-1 curve again. We could re-create it or we can create an import file. Most eQUEST users have a whole library of import files.
The way that we like to handle this is we create an “imports folder” in our eQUEST projects directory. I like to call it “1 imports”. That way, it stays at the top which will come into play later. I already have an import file just for example. We're going to re-create this. In a previous file, we created the 90.1 fan and now we want to create an import to bring into our new VAV building.
We navigate to the file that we created this in, and we're going to open up the .inp file in notepad again. I'm going to do a control+F and find 90-1 which was contained in the name of the curve. We want to find the performance curves. We're going to copy this, control+C, and we're going to create a new project. I'm going to hit control+V. Don't forget to put a double period at the end or it won't work.
Now we can save this. I want to save it into the imports folder. I'm going to call it 90-1 VAV LEED. It's going to save as a .txt. Unfortunately, this program doesn't let us change the extension to .inp so I'm going to have to do that manually. I'm going to save this. Now I'm going to go back to that imports folder. I just have to change the .txt extension so that it's .inp. We have now a new import file set up. Here we have a new LEED file where we want to add the performance curve. Now we can go to file, import file, and it automatically takes us to our projects directory. Here's why I call it “1 imports” because it lists it on the top. Now we can select 90-1 VAV LEED. We select open.
We could pre-process the file-- this is generally a good idea. We click yes we would like to re-evaluate all components, and everything went smoothly, or it would have said you had some errors. We did not, in this case.
Now we have the fan curve right here. We can apply this to our system, just like we did before. That, in itself, is not a huge time saver, but you can see that over time as you accumulate imports, you can import many things. There's a lot of additional options that we can cover in a later lesson.