One of the most important things here is creating the economics. We need to know the dollars per ton, the yearly maintenance expenses, relative to our options. We’re actually not going to do a life cycle analysis here because most of you can do that seven ways backwards. What’s important here that I need to show you how to do is a utility rate. What we’ll do is add our rates. We can use an existing one. I have several already built in here. If you want, we can create a rate — we’ll just click “library.” We can also go to Library up here, but it’s the same thing. It will prompt us to close this. 

Let’s go to a new rate structure. We’ll make a new definition. We’re going to define “electric demand” because electric demand can be pretty important if you do have a demand bill. Electric demand, of course, is different than consumption. Typical rate for demand — we’ll just say it’s $10 per kilowatt. We’ll have a later video explaining the rate structures, but for now what we’re going to do is pretty simple. We’ll go again and make another definition. We’ll make this electric consumption. Typical rate for electric consumption is 10 cents per kilowatt hour. That’s actually probably higher than the national average right now.

You can see, we can get incredibly detailed in these schedules, but we’re going to keep this one really simple. Finally, we’re going to have a gas boiler. Sometimes we’re not concerned about the heating plant, but in a climate such as La Crosse, Wisconsin, we would be concerned about the heating plant. We might very well use the same pipes in something like a two-pipe fan coil system. So, it starts with electric demand. We’ll go to “gas,” and around the national average would be $1 per therm. We’ll save that, and we have a completed rate structure. Close out of this library template editor. 

Now we have to select our rate, and apply. Now we have 10 cents per kilowatt hour, $10 per kilowatt, and $1 per therm. If we were comparing a rooftop unit to a chiller, we could also look at the recurring and additional depreciable costs. Even though it’s called Chiller Plant Analyzer, it does allow us to evaluate other types of cooling plans, so that’s something to consider, though I would suspect that most people are using this tool to evaluate chilling plants. We can go into this Economic Information tab, but usually this data is approximately right, and if you’re doing these advanced calculations, you might actually be doing them within a separate tool. However, you can change them here. You’ll want to keep them the same from alternative to alternative.