Welcome to the Energy-models.com presentation of eQUEST for LEED. As promised, we are going to do our best to work in the program as much as possible, but there are some things we have to cover in the slides. Don’t worry, we only have about 40 slides and we will cover most of them in the first hour. Many of you may be accustomed to asking question on the spot, but I’ve found that since what we are doing is logical, questions are often answered in the next slide or two. Please save the questions for designated times. If you’re like me, you might take so many notes that it gets in the way of your learning. We will be providing an ample amount of notes in the cheat sheet. Additionally, the presentation will be recorded and available to you later. Knowing that, you may of course take notes as you please, but for people like myself, it may help you to know that most of the notes will be available to you in the downloadable cheat sheet. In addition to the cheat sheet, the eQUEST files we are working on today are downloadable along with the details from the example file, so I think it would be counterproductive to attempt to frantically follow along in eQUEST. That said, let’s move on. As you may know, my name is Bob Fassbender. Some of you may even have spoke with me given that I worked for Trane CDS for a bit over 3 years. I’ve taught this course and other similar courses in something like 36 states. I am trying to cut back on my travel, but I would like to add Hawaii to that list of states…. Anyway, while at CDS I travelled to various locations teaching eQUEST and made a lot of observations about what works and doesn’t work. So, after I left CDS, I helped start energy-models.com. I also continue to perform LEED models in eQUEST, so I know how daunting modeling for LEED can be. Many of you have asked about breaking down the continuing education in this course, and we want to clarify the continuing education that you signed up for. One of the downsides about continuing education credits is that we have to stick to a protocol, so while we are trying to limit the number of the slides, some slides are required, such as “What this course covers.” Okay, so what does this course cover? Basically, in this course we are going to create a eQUEST file for LEED EAc1/p2. The main part of this, or the most complicated part, is creating the baseline building which will be a large part of our focus. We are also going to cover troubleshooting as well as what reports to submit. Finally, we will cover a few logistical issues along the way such as time and cost estimation. We will briefly cover estimating the total number of LEED points. There are a few things that would be helpful to know already at this point, such as general eQUEST use. You should know what I mean by pd2 and .inp files. However, the important part of today’s training is the LEED process and how it is implemented in eQUEST. If you need a refresh on eQUEST operations, you may want to complete or at least review the eQUEST online training which covers almost everything you need to know for general eQUEST operation. So in short, after this course, you should be able to model a LEED building in eQUEST, troubleshoot it and have a pretty good idea of the resources it takes to model for LEED. With all of that said, let’s jump into our crash course, or maybe we should call this a highlight reel. Just like any job, this requires a set of tools. Obviously, you need eQUEST, though you don’t need it for this course. You should have a printed copy of ASHRAE STD 90.1-2007. Remember, Appendix G is the most important part of Standard 90.1 and you should take the time to read through it. And if you read through it, don’t forget that reading it qualifies you for additional GBCI CE hours for LEED AP’s and green associates. Soon we will need the 2011 version. You should also have a copy of the current LEED manual, though you could probably get by with just the digital copy. Finally, I can’t seem to find a better method than keeping printed copies of the building drawings and marking them up with highlighters. You’ll see what we mean by this as we’ve marked up the drawings in the case study materials. In the course description we mention unmet hours without realizing that some people don’t know what an unmet hour is. Basically, an unmet hour is any hour where the model has 1 room that is not at it’s setpoint. Unmet hours are actually poorly defined for LEED. eQUEST uses it’s own definition, which is any space that is beyond it’s setpoint by 1.25 degrees. One interesting thing about unmet hours is that you can have 1 room out of 100 causing an unmet hour. Or If you have 99 rooms unmet at that same hour, it counts as 1 unmet hour either way. The reason we bring this up early is because it is the number 1 easiest way to get a file denied. It’s also the most common question CDS receives. I’ve also witnessed people spending more time resolving unmet hours than on their entire model. So, much of what we do and recommend to you will have the focus of preventing unmet hours. Now that we know what we don’t want, let’s take a look at 5 things we want to know about our model. We need to know: The climate zone The building total square footage The type of building and what kind of heat it uses. The percent glass The rate structure It should be noted that the Climate Zone can be found with the climatezoner tool on energy-models.com where all you need is the address or zip code Otherwise, you need to know the county, and then you can look up that county in APPENDIX B in ASHRAE STD 90.1, and that can be pretty tedious, plus it’s often confusing. The three remaining items can be found in the design documents, but eQUEST can also help you find them as we will see in a minute. Now that we covered a few things in eQUEST, let’s run through the process. We have this documented in a cheat sheet for you, but this next segment we are keeping in the slides because it seems to freeze the webinar. You’ll be able to download the cheat sheet later or view it online. We recommend using a mouse with a scroll wheel. I’d tell you where to find it, but I want to make sure that everyone is paying attention during this next segment where we are going to start with a completed project. We want you to know what you are going to be modeling ahead of time. I remember that when I first took a similar course, I didn’t know what the target was and I spent the whole day really confused. The second time I took the training, it went well. I think this is because I started with the end in mind. There’s a lot of things in life where you can “wing it”. LEED is not one of them. Start with the end in mind.. Or when you are already finished.