Lesson summary: This transcript covers practical DOE 2.3, eQUEST workflows for eQUEST energy modeling. The transcript has been organized with SEO-friendly headings and readable paragraph breaks so it can be posted with the corresponding training video.
Thank you everyone for joining on this new webinar. I've spent a year getting this ready and there's no presentation, no materials. What I want to do after I've ran through this and started a PowerPoint, decided that it would be better for you to make your own notes in a similar fashion that I did over the past one year. The first thing before we do anything else, so that some of you can just call it a day and say that you accomplished what you set out for is I just want to show you how to enable the DOE2.3 engine if you don't already know that.
So first of all, there's two versions of eQUEST on my desktop here. And just checking something here. There's two versions. One is the older version, which I like to keep installed 7173 because I can compare the screens.
So the newest version is 7175. I open this and right here when you open this, you can note the build and the DOE2 version. Right now it's set to DOE2.3. By default, when you install this, it will be set at DOE2.2.
I'm just going to open a recent project. We have to be in a project to change the setting and we simply go to the tools menu and you select the DOE2 version at next startup and I would change it if I needed to to DOE2.3. All this does is it changes the eQUEST.ini file so that when you start eQUEST, it reads from that file. As a result, once you change it one time, it's going to stay with the 2.3 version until you tell it to turn to the DOE2.2 version again.
So once you switch to DOE2.3, it's going to stay DOE2.3 until you tell it to switch back at this screen. You could edit the .ini file, but I've tried that and there's more than two modes and I caused some crashes by selecting the wrong number. I definitely want to change it there unless, of course, you know the exact modes. Okay, so that's how we initialize eQUEST.
I am going to close this window. There's no need to save. Saving has no merit on the .ini file. It's already changed once we make that selection.
Okay, so I just wanted to cut to the point there and that's usually when some people will say, okay, I've learned everything I need to learn. The next thing that we're going to do is I want to show you where you can get some help files and where you can, what files we should look at. We're going to look at a number of these today and that's where I'm going to be teaching from instead of slides directly from eQUEST and directly from materials that you would be using. So you should know about DOE2.com, the website where you download eQUEST.
This is where you get the most current version right here, download a complete eQUEST version. That should be 7175. There's two documents that we want to cover and we want to have for the purposes of this presentation. One of them is, and I already have this open in another window so no need to download it for me, is this DOE2.3 documentation.
That's the big document. And this document is the updated changes to eQUEST. I'm just going to open those. This information is also in the eQUEST help file but what I like about a PDF is that we can add notes to it and I actually just printed it and I have a printed copy where I wrote notes all over that and that's one way to do that.
There is an advantage to making notes in your own PDF because you can do a control F and search your notes. I find that helpful too. The other document, now this document is only nine pages and we only need to look at maybe the first half of the first page. This states that build 7175, the release state and it has a few statements here that are really relevant.
One thing we have to realize is that development happens first, documentation happens second, and as in all things, the documentation takes less of a precedent or probably has less importance to the development team as making the software work. It's just a reality of pretty much all software that the documentation doesn't always quite keep up. So my advice is to look at this updated file, note what changes are in here and you can probably commit them to memory and those should be correct over the larger PDF which will probably take longer to update or it's easy to forget to update a particular thing and we'll see that as we go. Another thing is that I have heard that the development with eQUEST is at a peak right now.
There's more developments going on now than before and we'll want to keep that in mind as we look at some of this. So we looked at how to start eQUEST 0.2.3 and the two main documents that you'll need to operate it. I guess at this point some of you may say, okay, that's all I needed. Again, I don't need the webinar.
A lot in this manual here doesn't tell you exactly what to do. It was a lot of trial and error over time and I'm happy to say that I've struggled through some of these myself and as a result have learned some insight that I can now teach. So now we open eQUEST and we open it and we see a the build version and the DOE 2.3 version is still active. That's what you want to check.
If you're trying to open a file from DOE 2.2, it's not backwards compatible. Usually it works if it's still in the wizard mode. I've had some odd things happen but I have been able to open DOE 2.2 files in this version. I have not been able to open them backwards.
You can do that but I would recommend strongly against that unless you're a very seasoned eQUEST user and you're also good at text edits and understanding code because there'll be a vast number of fine changes that you have to make in your .inp and probably your .pd2 file to make these interoperable. All right and now I have one comment. Someone's friend cannot get into the webinar. She's okay.
That always happens. It's guaranteed. So anyway I'm trying to sign in beforehand to avoid that but we should be set. Okay so we see this.
It's not backwards compatible. One thing we'll want to know is that let's just say we're going to select an existing project to open. There are two folders and you'll want to use these two folders so that you avoid confusion. There's just the standard eQUEST 365 project folder and the eQUEST 365 DOE 2.3 project folder.
All right have some questions on how to enable DOE 2.3. I'll show you that in a second. If you are familiar with some of the ways that I've presented over the years I like to jump straight into it and I don't even like introducing myself. So anyway so if we look at this it's going to default to this folder.
There is the other folder here. You really want to keep them the files separate. There's a few tricks that we can do to help save things and preserve things that I like about eQUEST that we'll do as we work through a project. By the way for the folks that are just joining us you have to go to the tools menu when you're in eQUEST and you have to select your engine and then excuse me you have to select your engine and select DOE 2.3, exit out of eQUEST and reopen it and that will keep you in DOE 2.3 until you tell it to switch back.
I'm going to create a new file and the wizards are the same as before. I haven't been able to note any substantial changes. I haven't been able to note any changes at all. Maybe one or two things in the wizards and they're not fields they're just some inputs.
So most of the time I don't even use the SD wizard. Some people do. If you're using just the SD wizard it shouldn't really matter which version of eQUEST you're using a ton upon intended because it could matter a ton of air conditioning because the load sizing did change in the engine. We'll get to that but as far as how the wizards look they look the same and the screens are the same there might be one or two fields that are different.
I've done a number of side-by-side comparisons and haven't really noted anything. We're going to call this now we don't need to really call this anything in particular because I'm not going to use this file. Web 18 was set a weather location. I want to stick to something with four seasons.
I usually try to do that for demos. New York is a pretty solid climate zone four if I recall correctly. So we proceed through here. I don't need to set up anything in particular just hit finish.
I changed the weather location. We look at the systems there's still seven screens. A bunch of new systems have been added according to the documentation but as far as I can recall I don't see any of the main systems added here. The first thing we're going to look at is dedicated outdoor air system.
That is not on the wizard. We have to do that in detailed mode. And so we would proceed as usual here and let me think I'm going to go with system per zone because I want a number of systems in this the example file that we're going to use. We only set up one system.
Equestral will spit out a few others. And by the way I know that some of you are probably eating lunch during this webinar. About halfway through if you haven't noticed I have a mild cold and I'm losing my voice here and there. So about halfway through I might need to take five minutes myself and drink some water or just take a few minutes for my voice to hang in there.
So I don't think it's anything serious across my fingers of course but overall hanging in there. So we have this system per zone and I'm just going to return to the navigator and I'm going to click finish. Okay so at this point we're still in wizard mode so you have to change to detailed data edit. Pretty much like I said all the new features you have to be using detailed mode which is good because they didn't have to change the wizard as much which I suspect would cause a lot of crashing and bugs and more things to learn.
I think it's easier to add things at least this way for the first iteration and change them as we go. As always we want to be we want to be familiar with the help file and just like any other project if I open a system here we can select our system types maybe we're confused about a system so we right click it we go to item help for that system and we can look through this but really what I'm getting at here is before we decide that we're going to use the 2.3 engine and that it's the best thing in the world we really want to consider why not to use it and there are a number of reasons that we should not use it. There's a large set of features the one that we're not going to look at all of them but the one that we're going to focus on here is system because this is pretty self-explanatory let's see let's go to type okay so we went to I went through that kind of quickly it's going to look at the intro but we don't need to discuss trauma walls and we're going to look at the system types so the following system types are not currently implemented we should also be able to see this in the the pdf file for DOE 2.3 as well but that whole file should be in the help file too and it's useful to access it in both forms here's the big one ptax are not currently implemented but they are slated for implementation if you're doing multi-family high-rise or you're doing something for lead and you have system one you can't model ptax here there are workarounds so it's not a deal breaker in fact since the the webinar on march 12th and today's webinar I actually switched a file from 2.2 to 2.3 that had ptax because I needed to show the benefit of the dedicated outside air and I was able to do that without really any considerable loss of accuracy I think that the accuracy was definitely gained but modeling ptax was impossible so I had to model the single zone system for each individual space a little bit of extra effort the other one here that had me concerned is a system that not everyone uses it's a troubleshooting system only it's the sum system and it's not currently implemented it doesn't even say but slated for implementation however if you recall this updated pdf 7175 says that it enabled the sum system type in the models so it didn't even say it was slated for implementation and then they did add it and they added it in one iteration so I find that promising if you go through a number of these most of these are systems that I've almost never modeled over the past 15 years and for example some of these are just that this the szci single zone condensing I don't know something it has not been popular for over 40 years so there's really no need for them to add that and I think it's it's a good thing for them to clean clean house with this this other system they had found major problems in the algorithm pertaining to the moisture balance calculations so in other words it's not here but the previous version wasn't really working anyway so uh it's not really much of a loss you could I guess it would look like you were modeling it but if there was any moisture balance uh calculations involved it was modeling it incorrectly anyway so uh the the big one here is ptax there are work rounds it's kind of work rounds for everything but you will have to decide if you're going to use uh 2.2 or 2.3 I think uh ice rinks were improved upon in 2.2 and they were removed in 2.3 I I don't model ice rinks yeah so this is a do 2.2 feature not currently implemented in do 2.3 if you have any sort of special scenario you definitely want to search the help file or the pdf something like that uh from memory I believe that ice rinks uh their capability was actually improved in do 2.2 so a few things there the main thing is the systems as far as most people as most people are concerned because inevitably everyone's modeling ptax of some sort so let's close this and now let's look at the system type and we can see right here there's a DOAS system here that that's new and the sum system as we noted in the help file has been enabled even the health file said it's not as we noted in the update log it is here so it clearly was added uh and the help file and the pdf are slightly out of date and I think that they always will be the documentation's not going to keep up with uh the development it almost never seems to outside of a fortune 500 company okay we have a really good question here uh that's pertinent at the moment uh is it safe to assume that you can start with 2.2 to enable anything missing from 2.3 then enable 2.3 after and uh um okay so it's semi safe I guess as long as you're not jumping into the detailed mode if you're if you're working from within the wizards you you can take a file that you haven't switched to detailed mode and open that in uh DOE 2.3 and most of the time it will be forward compatible with maybe an error or so for example in a file that I just switched I did the whole thing in the wizard in doh 2.2 and it's actually you know someone's private file so I can't I can't show you the error but uh when I converted it into uh when I converted it into a DOE 2.3 file everything went smoothly and suddenly there was an error for every single zone and there was it said it's missing the water loop heat pump type because it was the way that the system it uses it uses different keywords for that system in the next engine obviously no knowing enough I could have gone through and uh edit and just selected one for each system in the and done that 126 times uh but I just went into and I use this a lot you don't need the request I and I file uh I just went into the .imp file and I did a I did a fine change and and was able to replace all of those lines and then add a second line uh that's another topic but anyway it was just one small thing uh other times it's it's been completely fine uh but with that one it was it was a few minutes of extra work and I would have to say you you should assume that there will at least be some work uh that you may have to fill in some extra fields uh the the parentheses and equal signs and and all of this changes slightly from DOE 2.3 to uh it changes slightly from DOE 2.3 uh 2 to DOE 2.3 and that's where uh you have to stick with the wizards because once you're once you're in detailed mode you're editing the .imp file directly and I can't see that being interoperable unless you you go into the text editor and fix that yourself okay the next thing I'm just making sure that there's I didn't miss something in my notes here after that question all right so when we went in the wizard file I assumed we just clicked okay I didn't even look at anything and hopefully this will cause some errors some of these are intentional so that that we can see what what errors we're going to get that we will get in inevitably and how to fix them so I clicked that just poking through some things I want to make sure that we're going to get a few errors okay good now next up how do we enable a DOAS system historically there's several methods depending on who you're talking to and most of us are familiar with the dummy room method if we've modeled it at all and that needs to be at the very top or eQUEST will implode the second that you try to simulate with the new DOAS it it doesn't matter where where the system is so all we have to do is we go into airside systems and we just create an hvac system by right clicking I'm going to call this the very creative DOAS one create it from scratch and we're going to skip a lot of details just showing you how to implement this first and then it's going to ask for a heat source this is neat because this is pretty much all of the available heat sources are available to use for a heat source for for a outdoor air unit I am going to select furnace I don't want to use a hot water loop because I didn't define one and it'll just prompt me to define one if I if I do that and then the next thing we have to select the cool source there are less choices here chilled water or dx I suppose none is an option as well I haven't modeled the building with none yet so I'm just going to select electric dx again if I select the chilled water it means we're going to have to define a chiller chilled water loop I don't need to do that all right so we have our DOAS system it added it right at the bottom of our list of systems this is different because typically it had to be at the top or equals crashed like I mentioned this can just be added it's a different it's a completely different monster than than it used to be this is just a typical system there are a lot of things that work differently with it for example if we go to the outdoor air tab everything is is grayed out here besides the dedicated outdoor air system it appears that we can chain these systems together I have not tried that yet but right now we can't because we only have one but it appears that we can chain them together someone just asked about the VRF coil that's a whole section that we're going to talk about so we're not going to talk VRF right now I just want to show you how to enable a dedicated outdoor air so this is just like a regular system some of the fields that are not relevant will be you won't be allowed to change them we have to set up the cooling input ratio this is unique to the compressor on the DOAS unit just like we have a separate unit feeding into an air handling unit somewhere and everything is just it's just like setting up a regular rooftop see here there's a few things that are slightly different setting up the cooling control and the and also the heating control we'll talk about the the heat control there's three methods the default method is constant so we're just sending constant supply air to we're sending constant supply air to an air handling unit a heat pump or what have you what basically almost any combination that you can think of there is one system that we cannot send that that we can't use a dedicated outdoor air with and it's a system that it's it's not one of the systems that's defaulted here it's just a it's a kind of an esoteric system that I've never modeled we can get to that one in the help file right now we can add that DOAS and we created the system but we're using just defaults there's a few questions we have on on this I'm going to get to them so if you have an open question right now just wait a moment we'll cover it as we go we have this unit here we've created it we assume that we've set up all of our parameters now we have to implement it the way that you implement the dedicated outside air is at the system level it used to be that you would have system and there was a field that said outside air provided from and that field is no longer there instead under the outdoor air tab we select the DOAS the DOAS system and here we're going to select DOAS1 and now this is one of the benefits over the previous system and DOA 2.2 we have the option to supply it in the in the return air intake at the mix there or we can supply it separately as a conditioned zone when you select conditioned zones this is effectively like you have a second set of ductwork going into the zones in the system that are going to supply air to those zones without going through the other system and that gives us a lot of opportunity the next thing is that we can add dedicated outdoor air to the same system to multiple systems it actually is there's no limit on that so here we can add this again and just to try to break it the first thing I thought of was well I'm going to I'm going to set one to mix there and the other one to conditioned zones and and see if when I run this if that crashes or not and in theory it should be fine and and it is this won't give us an error it will it should change the controls but we'll get to that so here we have our second system and we have the dedicated outdoor air attached to it and this is going it's putting the dedicated outdoor air directly into the package single zone system where the return air would feed it I'm going to click done and I'm going to highlight the system and just to show you a general tip that I use for eQUEST I'm going to highlight this DOAS one system and then I'm going to create another HVAC system call it DOAS two and then I'm going to copy an existing component the only benefit that we had from highlighting that first is when we select copy an existing component it will automatically select the component to copy as the last component that you had highlighted so we have that and these are two identical DOAS units there there's a lot there's there's some questions but there's a lot of detail to go on this this is approximately a third of the webinar here it's obviously the most anticipated feature and we can we can tie some of the other features into it so we we added DOAS one to the first two systems and now we can go to again outdoor air let's say DOAS two and I'm going to supply it directly to the condition zones select the next system and supply this DOAS two directly to the condition zones again there is a caveat that we must not forget eQUEST for almost all systems assumes that the air is perfectly mixed thus if we set this dedicated outdoor air unit to directly to condition zones the thermodynamics will work but it does not speak to the thermal comfort if we were to supply for example 55 degree outdoor air directly into a space and someone was sitting next to that diffuser they're probably going to be pretty uncomfortable however eQUEST doesn't know that so that would be something that that's on the design end I don't think that people expect eQUEST to tell them that but I did just want to mention it because it is a new feature and it it can be a design problem eQUEST does not have any idea where you're putting your diffusers it just understands this that it is controlled separately than the air handling unit which takes us to our next point just open one of these since they're identical if you'll notice the fan schedule is undefined here this defaults to the fan operating you can see that there's a fan here there is a fan in the system separate from the regular air handling unit but what will cause this fan to operate is the fan schedule from the air handling unit and that gives us a lot of different options we can we can set up this schedule as we please we can turn it off for parts of the day so the night and so that parts of the DOAS unit will not operate even though the regular air handling unit is is operating still if we have a funny scenario where they operate independently of each other we can use the schedule to set that up an interesting scenario is if we have the air handling unit off at at night but we want to provide outdoor air at night you know for example similar to night purge uh i should mention that night purge the typical setup is not enabled in DOA 2.3 but you you can set up ways around it so for example in this particular scenario we could set this schedule to 24-7 and that would provide the outdoor air 24-7 to the system provided that it's going directly to the condition zones if it was going to i thought i had this one mixed air if it was going to the mixed air it would still be it would still be off both fans would have to be on to get the outdoor air if we have the DOAS unit on with the 24-7 schedule and we have the fan off for the air handling unit or the single zone system you can't you wouldn't be able to assume that there would be enough static pressure to put that air through so it would assume in the case of mixed air that you you cannot supply just the dedicated outdoor air you you have you can either supply mixed air or you you can supply mixed air with no outdoor air but but you can't supply just outdoor air and since we have this system tied into the first system and the second system this is where i i mentioned it would affect the controls and that uh it will still operate but it will affect the controls and the fact that one is hooked up to mixed air would change your schedules it can get really complicated really quick and i just wanted to illustrate the example that you could use the DOAS unit if it's provided everything to condition zones you can run that supply outside air to the zones even when the air handling unit or the single zone system here is off the help file actually has some explanation on that as well so that's something that it is explained in depth in the in the help file not that specific example but you can take that away from that all right i am thinking there is a question here i'm trying to interpret this question okay so there's a question on explaining how outside air and effectiveness should be modeled i believe that question is referring to ashray standard 62 where there's an air supply effectiveness one of the great things about this about the DOAS ability and i think one of the reasons that dedicated outdoor air is becoming popular enough where they had to add it to eQUEST when we apply dedicated outdoor air directly to the condition zones we can provide the exact ashray amount of air per ashray standard 62 to every single zone and if we put the the the diffuser in the right place and we have the temperatures correct the effectiveness is going to be 100 effectiveness for those of you who who are not sure what this question refers to i'll try to be brief basically in ashray standard 62 if i'm understanding the correct question correctly there's this effectiveness factor because sometimes ventilation gets short short circuited and obviously that's problematic but one of the ways that we can at least assure that it's 100 effective is directly to the zones the rest of the question i will have to get back to you on because we're not going to have time to cover that but it's a good question if i'm going to cover something along this along similar lines let's go back to the DOAS system if you know we didn't specify capacity we didn't specify the number of CFM we didn't specify any of that by default this will size automatically it will look at the systems that it's assigned to and it's going to look at the systems that it's assigned to and it's going to tally their air that the air demand that's required from it from there based on your set points it's going to calculate capacity specifically based on on these rated these rated entering temperatures i believe we have our typical setup so we did not define any capacity or CFM you can't you can we can enter the supply fan we just left it default you can also specify if the fan control we left it at variable speed there's a number of things in in the this new version of eQUEST where we don't get to specify this this fan controls variable speed DOAS is not one of them and in some other places you simply have to specify this part load rate you have to specify the curve here we can set the design CFM if we needed to and i would encourage you to do that if you have the unit defined and then of course you would want to be sure that your individual zones are calling for the appropriate amount of ventilation all right so first thing let's just see if this works all right boom and we have one run terminated due to an error and this is going to happen to you if you if you do this we're going to open the dot sim file here and there's not much to it all right it says well we can't model any condomizer can't model any condomizer can't model any condomizer and so on so i think it's it's clear and i didn't mention this before that you cannot model an condomizer with dedicated outdoor air there's simply too many controls for the for eQUEST to handle you could try to work around it with schedules and things in that but it just it doesn't work automatically so what we need to do here is uh we're just gonna turn that economizer to undefined for our four systems that have dedicated outside air on them undefined so okay so just be sure that i got that that's and i can leave the economizers on the other systems uh that was not a problem it was just because there were airside economizers on systems that also were attached to the dedicated outdoor air unit there's a question about uh the cfm being determined uh that's we're gonna cover that that's that's next and now we simulate simulate this and we can see that that the run completed successfully there's nothing for us to compare it to so there's there's no need to look at results right now as everything was just input simply to run an example file so i'm going to close this and we're gonna continue moving there was a question and we're getting to this right now uh how to how does it determine the outdoor air well in general when you have one of these specified it will give you it will give you the flow parameters for its peak in the design process though you're not going to know that and it defaults to to blank but we do define the spaces and the zone so we have this self-parameter zone let's go look at the building shell look at the self-parameter space there are nine people in here and there are nine people in the next space now if we go back to our zones one's a plenum zone so there's there should be no ventilation we look at our outdoor air uh we have uh 18.2 cfm per person so 18.2 times uh nine it's like 162 something like that so it should see okay there's 162 or so cfm attached to this zone and that's attached to the dores unit and then the dores unit is also attached to this zone which also has 162 cfm is it i think i might be i might be i might be carrying the one wrong but uh i don't know 20 times 20 times nine is this 180 so i think that's pretty close but we're gonna find out so i don't want to get i didn't want to get the calculator because i want to show us how we're gonna find that number and and confirm if it's correct too before we do that since as long as we're doing this i want to show some one of the advantages to having this DOAS in this format prior to when we had the workaround we had a workaround with the dummy zone and dummy system any sort of heat recovery attempts had to assume that uh you were recovering heat and you you'd have to do that manually and make a schedule based on the load profile of the building how many how much heat was coming back and what the temperature of the return air should be and so on there were also some changes to ERV so we're gonna we're gonna cover both of these in in the same topic so some of the changes with ervs this used to be just yes or no now the ERV energy recovery device we want to try to add it to a dedicated outdoor air system so i want to cover that as well the help file said that we couldn't do ERV with the oas but this says that we can so we're gonna give it a try the help file also says that there are some new things about ERV in this version we have multiple choices now when we select an energy recovery device we can recover heat from the relief only air we can cover a recover heat from exhaust only or we can recover from from both sometimes you don't want to recover from the exhaust air for example with there's a fume hood or there's something with the exhaust air that you don't want to put on an energy wheel you would just go with relief only air up until now that's been impossible across all systems in eQUEST but especially been impossible on dedicated outside air systems so this is the reason that i just switched a file from that that had p-tax from doh 2.2 to DOE 2.3 was because it had a detailed dedicated outside air system with an energy recovery device on it if we select yes by the way which i suspect that most of us will do it will prompt us and i'm going to select an enthalpy wheel seems to be the most common when we select that it's automatically going to fill in the effectiveness for us these numbers usually come from the manufacturer but this is reasonably effective we selected yes yes just defaults to what it used to the relief plus the exhaust so it's all of the air that it that it can recover from it does if we select yes that's the same thing as is selecting relief plus exhaust it's a pretty typical setup right here and operation when the fans are on that's pretty normal now what we need to do we're going to try to simulate this again and we get an air so at first glance it's like oh they still don't work still doesn't work with the dedicated outside air and the ERV like it says in the help file however if we look at the air like like we should anytime we get a fatal error it uses the hvac fans but recovers zonal exhaust air as a result the ERV must have self-contained fans okay well that's that's not that much of a problem so we would add the heat recovery unit just like we did here and we have to have ERV fans that are self-contained all this is saying is that the energy recovery wheel gets its own set of fans it's eQUEST is saying okay you you have to have its own set of fans to operate this ERV adding fans is really just the same as adding fan energy so if in fact there were no extra fans to operate the energy recovery device we could just put in a really really low number for this kw per cfm and pretend these fans are there so that the system works and the fan power would be calculated according to whatever we had in the fan screen if you do have separate fans naturally it's pretty easy it's easier to model it that way because you could know the fan power so we could set the fan power notice here as I mentioned it doesn't always give us the option to select a variable speed fan right here thank you someone yes I changed the ERV power yes okay so this field is blank so we would put in a small so sorry yes I made a mistake here that one was on an accident so this is the ERV power there's a small motor on the energy recovery wheel typically if we're talking about a a desiccant wheel and that spins and that has the power to it thank you for pointing that out we could enter a really small fan power here in fact we can't leave this blank and it won't crash out so I have to assume that the fan power will come out to zero if we leave this blank possibly not that's that's something we would have to verify so anyway I changed the ERV power which is in which just explains also why it's such a small number to begin with this is the the power of the motor that's used to spin the the desiccant wheel this is the fan power at the design we could make this really small if we didn't have zone ERV self-contained fans maybe we do and someone also mentioned that this would auto size but my point is it in the case where we're just adding an ERV to a dedicated outside air system and there are not actually self-contained fans on it we we just kind of zero these fans out it's that's just a cheap workaround if there are fans and there could be well we could just we could enter the the fan power or let it default so back to where where I was I appreciate the pointing that out is this field is the fan power we don't get the option of just saying oh this is a variable speed fan we have to select the fan on loading curve and right here we actually don't I don't see a variable speed on loading curve we would have to create one or import one or something like that if we had one somewhere else in another file but right now I'm just going to leave this to constant volume it's it's but the main thing that I want to point out here is we'll see you'll see more and more situations like this in DOE 2.3 where it doesn't give you an option of selecting variable speed instead it just makes you select the curve in the past when you've selected variable speed all that does is that applies a fan power curve that's built into the eQUEST database anyway in my opinion this is a much more transparent method of what's going on it's a little bit more difficult to to enter because you can't simply just select variable speed and this isn't I'm not just speaking for dedicated outside air self-contained fans I see this in a number of places where we just supply a curve as opposed to in the past where we could just set it to a constant speed or variable speed and so on all right from here we can click done and now we added that and the simulation is complete so it ran however we still don't know if it worked or not because the the literature is not very clear it has one line saying oh well this was enabled on 7175 and uh in the help file it says that uh the ERV does not work for dedicated outside air I I don't want to dig through the help file and waste time finding that but it says that somewhere in the documentation so there's there's a bit of confusion then does this work or did it not and one of the things that I just have done multiple multiple times as I've used uh uh DOE 2.3 is use hourly reports to validate that information so we're going to make it an hourly report the the first thing to check if something works or not I would typically just run a parametric run and create a parametric run call this no ERV and then we'll run this based on the baseline run then we'll create a component I'm doing this for two reasons actually just for the example component type HVAC system we select that and we don't see the dedicated outside air system if we select the HVAC system type here uh we can select uh the dedicated outdoor air systems and those systems only we can make a a change to to both of these or to one of them we had only set it to one one energy recovery type and then it's this weird keyword recover exhaust and we'll select no this and this is how this is how I would test if something was working or not just run a run a parametric run where it's turned off the the the other reason for showing this demo is to show you that that HVAC system types are broken into uh DOAS and the typical HVAC systems that you may have into various system types we run this remember it wasn't a lot of it wasn't a lot of airflow and simulate this notice the simulation method changed and we'll see simulation progress go up to 200 there's quite a lot to read about on on how that changed let's try to cover that briefly I'm just gonna view the regular results scroll down here for the baseline I can just look at uh the heat and the cooling and then see what happens with no ERV the heat goes up and the cooling basically doesn't change at all which we would sort of expect since these are way more effective in in heating and there are other gains and losses with static not just for the fans but also for for heat so now it appears to have worked but if we really wanted to see if it worked and a number of other things we'd want to create an hourly report this can also be used to determine the temperature coming from the dedicated outdoor air unit so before we look at that report I just want to call this out we're not going to do an example here for the cool control constant is pretty typical in most models that I see that's even when it's not constant I see that people just leave this at the default of constant one in fact the other two are coldest and warmest if you look at the item help I don't need to read all of this at once here let's just look at maybe one of these it depends where it is attached so if it's attached to the next air section it sets the supply air cooling set point to be equal to the warmest cooling supply air set point of any of the systems served if it's set directly to the zones it sets the supply air cooling set point to be equal to the warmest zone terminal so my guess is as we took the DOAS unit and we we provided both of these options it would just default to the warmest of either the system or the warmest of the zones attached to the the other system so if we go to heating control there's actually a couple extra things that it says the the only thing that it says is the result in heating set point will never be allowed to be warmer than the cooling set point okay so we don't need to get directly into the controls for the sake of this exercise but I want to make you aware of them all right so we're not good we're just leaving at a constant 60 and 65 for heating and cooling respectively if we go to project and site one of the things that like I said you just don't know if this works right it appears to have run in and appears to have saved some energy but really not sure we also might be uncertain how much CFM is going to this dedicated outside air unit so we can we can solve all of these things by just making custom reports I'm going to create an hourly report you can call this really anything I'm going to create it from scratch oh can't use the same name hourly report schedule and we have to pick the first block the em1 and fm1 are default blocks we're going to edit this block okay the last block we are going to select the building hvac system I think I am mistaken here and not building hvac system and the first one that it has selected is the happens to be the one that we want information on we would need to select the correct system here there are a lot of variables it automatically selects the first one for you you have to have one variable selected in an hourly report we can scroll through some of these and there's a lot of these so I mean I've done this ahead of time I'm just going to leave that first one checked just to have something checked temp of air leaving heat coil this is actually relevant we could look at the temperature of the air leaving the cool coil as well that's not necessarily relevant to to what we're looking at to ensure that the ERV works but it's it's a variable that we might be concerned depending on our control type so I scroll through some of these one thing that I might want to check is the total system return airflow rate total system supply airflow rate those numbers could be different based on having a zone exhaust and then if we scroll way down there are some parameters specific to the ERV so ERV outdoor airflow ERV exhaust airflow and the outdoor air temperature entering the outdoor air temperature leaving the exhaust entering and the exhaust leaving that will give us our delta t's so we have our cfms and we have our delta t's and that's all we need to add right there I'm going to show you something on how to reuse this this report or any outdoor any hourly report that you're generating so right now we just need to we have to simulate again in order to generate those reports I probably should have run just I only I only needed to run the first simulation since the second one we had this disabled all right now I can look at simulation output files I want to make sure that I'm looking at the baseline design where we're running the ERV we don't need to look at any specific report we just click hourly results if you have excel it should just automatically open in excel I can't say if you have a different spreadsheet software so I should cover when you open an hourly report it's going to have your default hourly reports that's this that em and the fm1 that we had just by default this is the one that we added right here we have the temp leaving the heating coil temp leaving the cooling coil we had it locked in at 65 and 60 so we should see something like that so we see it moving between those and we see this air flow the cfm I'm trying to keep it on one screen that's the total system supply air flow it was we said it was like 162 each so it's like 160 oh that's pretty close 161 ish that nine people at 18.2 cfm per person and that was the total system flow for this doua's unit so it automatically calculated that from the zones and the ERV we had it the outdoor air flow uh coming from we selected yes so that was relief plus exhaust the exhaust air flow and the ERV outdoor air flow are then they have to be the same and here we have our two temperatures our outdoor air entering and our outdoor air leaving so this is in the winter time it's coming in pretty cold and leaving uh at almost almost at the supply temperature and then the exhaust air is going in at 70 degrees and leaving at 33 if we did our cross calculation there we could determine our efficiency we didn't get this back up to 70 degrees and unless it was 100 efficient that would that would be impossible uh not also we'd have to include the total enthalpy uh not just the temperatures but we can see that it approximately made it 70 some percent of the way there just by kind of making an approximation here so this definitely appears to be working and the updated document tells us that uh everything should be everything should be working as predicted i'm going to close out of this hourly report if you wanted to recreate that hourly report the wrong folder uh we were at web 18 here one of the things that i like about eQUEST a lot is we're still in this file uh we're we have the file open and we're accessing we just ran it so we have all these these extra files in here we're accessing the inp and the pd2 file and the parametric run files here as well this is not uh pertinent to what exactly we're doing but right here what i like to do here is if i wanted to back this file up and freeze it in the state we'll just take these three files and send them to a compressed folder and we'd have the date modified so i would know i don't even have to label it i would know when i made that back up it could change the file name if i wanted to what i'm going to show you here and we can open this file as well i have notepad plus plus that i use as a file editor you can you can open this in any file editor and we can even do this while eQUEST is open though any changes that you make and save could potentially cause problems so i have all of this here and at the very bottom there's an hourly report i could cut out this block i need copy this we made this uh DOAS block and we made this DOAS report and then i already well i have this done from a different run but i have a custom note in here the only thing that could cause problems is this variable needs to be the name of one of your systems and i put it in a comment here you set the DOAS uh i should say DOAS one to the name of your DOAS system actually it could be any system within ERV and then when we scrolled through those variables uh we had selected the first one that's why i left that one one one checked and i don't know the exact numerical order because there was a break in the line so the second one we selected must have been the 17th variable uh in the way that eQUEST counts it and then we selected some towards the bottom and those must have been somewhere around 300 so well we could take this we can save it to a .imp file and i've already done that and then it in a future model we find that file we can always go file and import a file to save the model uh and well that was on the desktop and i don't want to cause a conflict because it has the same name and then we would just import that and that would bring in uh the same overly report block that we just created which was was kind of a pain and once you make one you often tend to repeat the same one so we can import that again and use that for troubleshooting ervs or or DOAS specific variables okay now we're just going to cover uh some of the other uh some of the other features that we have in within eQUEST so the next the next thing that we're going to cover how to do is uh a much simpler at the surface thing to do not not so many options and complexities and one of the things that changed in the this version of eQUEST one of the things that changed in this version of eQUEST is chillers the there were some options added to chiller setup and uh there were uh some new features so we don't have any chillers on this particular project so what i want to do is i have to create a new project you can create chillers directly on the detailed view but in my experience it's always best to create them from the wizard uh it's just so easy to miss a pump or to miss a default or something like that and then have bugs so we're just gonna save this create a new file and i'm going to go with the db wizard fill their features let's select something random actually let's stick with new york so i don't have to download the weather file again if you
This lesson provides practical guidance for modelers working with DOE 2.3, eQUEST. Use this organized transcript as a reference while watching the video and applying the workflow inside eQUEST.