[Partial Transcript] So let’s open eQUEST 3.64. And let’s just create a new project via the wizard. And there are two wizards: schematic design or design development wizard. If you're doing a life cycle cost analysis, what’s referred to as the SD wizard is something that is great to start out with. In almost every LEED project that we do, the design development wizard is what we start with. It has a few more options, and since LEED models do require a significant amount of work, this is what we start with. So let’s go ahead and click that. And I just want to show you a few things here. So when we start an initial model, you obviously have to set the location, and as we mentioned the utility rates. There’s a few things that are misleading with eQUEST. One is this code analysis. And so people say, “Hey let’s do the LEED-NC version 3.” Don’t do this; it doesn't do really what you think that it does, or what it's supposed to do, at the moment. In the future it might, which would make this course a lot easier. But at the same time, no matter what they’ll ever be able to do with this, you should understand the process that we're going to cover today, because there’s so much about LEED that is subject to interpretation, that a computer could just never cover all of those caveats. And so, we have a location set, that’s pretty simple. When you select a California location, it selects utility rates. Those are not current, and they probably never will be current. And so typically we just set this to custom, and we fill this out later. And so two of the major points that we had poked at here were the code analysis: don’t mess with this LEED NC thing. It's just going to cause more trouble than it's worth. However, if you were new to eQUEST, that’s the first thing that people use typically. And it causes much more trouble than it's worth. For a new user, if you were an experienced, I think that an experienced user might be able to get something out of that. But it changes a number of things that may or may not be correct, and so you'll need to basically have this process memorized in order to double check that. And so the utilities we just go with custom, which we’ll be able to edit in one of the next screens. And so this initial wizard, we define the number of seasons. So for instance if it's a school, it has two seasons because it has school year and summer. We can specify up to three seasons, though most buildings are only one season because the schedule is reasonably similar throughout the year. And so in this screen we can define the electric rates, so here we can define the flat rates. Energy blocks are a bit more confusing. There’s a video in the eQUEST online section. So here if it was $10.00 per kilowatt, and $00.05 per kilowatt, this is all that we would have to enter. And in fact if we use a flat rate, now that I entered something here, I could put in zero, or something that’s really good to know, is instead of entering zero in items you changed, right click on it, and select restore defaults, and then you'll have a value in green. So typically when it's a flat rate it's going to be something around $00.08 to $00.10 per kilowatt hour. And the next screen is natural gas since we specified that. And that’s somewhere around $1.00 per therm, for statewide averages. From state to state, that can vary probably plus or minus $00.30. And so the final screen here is just initial set up. And then we have the project navigator; we walk through this entire process for the model that we're working with today. So we set up the building shells, which is basically just the frame of the building. And we set up the system types here. And so again we have this all on video. So we pointed out the LEED compliance that we mentioned, so let’s go ahead, you're not going to save changes to this. And let’s go ahead and just open sampleoffice.pd2. And so as we mentioned in the files the file that you typically open is the pd2 file if you have it. If you didn’t, theoretically you could open the .inp file as well. And I’m just going to skip changes to that file. If a file was created with a CAD file, and you used that file, when you open it, it will ask you, well, ‘Where is the CAD file?’ You can typically skip this step. So we could browse and find it, but we do not actually need to use the CAD file, because we're not going to reference it anymore. So we’ll just skip that. And it generates the building from the pd2 and the inp files at this point. And so if you're brand new to eQUEST, these buttons at the top are called modules. So there’s six modules and you typically want to work left to right with some exceptions. And since by the time we finish the wizard, the project inside is already set up, you want to enter at the building shell. Now here’s a picture of our building, and the zones. We can look at the 3D geometry, and by holding the control key and left clicking, we can look through this building. And you can see the zoning. We’ll cover more on this, actually some of this zoning in a minute. But you can see what we've modeled. And so a few of the things here, we have the building shell that we set up, and then the internal loads. We’ll get to the lighting power density, and the plug loads. So basically here we have a list of all of the spaces, and if you click on them they're highlighted on the screen. When we set this up, we had to go through and name all of these spaces. And each space has a plenum above it, and so theoretically you have to name all of the plenums too. And then on top of that, each one of these spaces gets assigned to a zone, and the zones are under the air side HVAC. So these are all the zones. A trick that we did, and again this is in the video, but if you do not watch that it's a tool that we wanted to point out is what you can do here is name all the spaces, which we would do in the spreadsheet for you. So you just go through here and name just the spaces, not even the plenums, not the zones. And what you can do is in Energy-Models.com, there’s this eQUEST space re-namer, and so this takes your .inp file and renames all of your remaining zones. So if you just name the spaces, it will rename all of the plenum spaces, and then it will rename all of the zones associated with that space. So it takes about one third of the time. So there’s actually full directions, and an example video here, if you needed to use this in the future. Now, we're going to discuss the proposed building. This view of eQUEST may be pretty new. So here is a good question “What are the global parameters that you have here?” It's actually quite simple. So what we do is we right click here and create a global parameter. And I don’t want to create a new one because they're pretty difficult to delete out of your project. So we create one, and we select numeric, it will just prompt us for the type, and then we put in a value. And one of these is LPD, is the lighting power density. And that is of course the lighting watts per square foot in the building. And we have a couple choices which we’ll discuss, but one of the choices is the space by space method, or the whole building method. And we're using the whole building method just because for a live course, it simplifies the amount of time, and it's the same theory either way. So if we look at the internal loads here, let’s look at the spread sheets, and select lighting. Here we have values in, I guess this color is a fuchsia, something like that, purple, pink, I don’t know which one to call it. But when you have a value in this color it means that it's referencing a global parameter. And so here let’s just right click, and we’ll say edit, view, user expression. And all we did is we typed in this which is something that is real common in eQUEST. So you type in # PA, parentheses, and then put in your global parameter in quotes. And what that will do is it's just basically like algebra. It will look at this value here, and fill in the blanks. So to prove our point, let’s put in a 1.2 here. And now that changed all of the values. So that’s one nice part about using the whole building method, is we can change everything at once. Otherwise you actually have to go through this space by space and put in either the watts per square foot, or the kilowatts of lighting in each space, which is of course an acceptable method. So let’s change this back. Okay and then let’s take a look at our system. In this building, we have primarily all the spaces set up with a VAV box. And there’s one air handling unit for the whole system. And then there’s a heat pump for the mechanical room. And we got this information from these office specs that you can download. And so this is where, if we wanted to put in the lighting, power density space by space, we could do that from this, but we would have to walk through each one of the spaces, which doesn't take that long, but it's something that I think is common sense at this point. And so you just walk through that spreadsheet view and define each space. So here’s a map of the building that we have marked up, and it's the first floor, second floor. And then on the last page we have the systems described. And under the AHU schedule, it tells us what rooms it serves. The heat pump serves only one room. And so that’s something that we had already set up in the wizard. Okay there’s a few other important points that we want to make about the proposed building explicitly for LEED. And so it's getting a little long here, it's a lot, and the next section is actually a step up. So why don’t we take a 15 minute break, go get some coffee, tea, water, snack whatever. Whatever you prefer. I’ll put the timer up, and we’ll meet back after that. If you have questions in the mean time feel free to submit them. I’ll try to answer them privately if need be. Hope you got some caffeine if you're need of it because this next section we're covering quite a bit in a short amount of time. We get to the really good stuff after lunch though so that’s when maybe caffeine is best used. But anyway, we already looked at the file in eQUEST for just a brief overview, but let’s actually look at what we're modeling here. Okay so what are we modeling? We're modeling this building here that we have drawn in Google sketch up. The reason that we have drawn is that we don’t forget about some of the important factors like this parking lot lights, we have the sidewalk lighting and so on. And so, in general, you saw the shape of the building, it looks almost exactly the same in eQUEST. And so we’ll get to some of these windows in a minute. If we look at this project with the roof off you can see that we have some actually pretty large rooms on this building. And here we have some rooms that were combined. And so if you look at the drawing, and this is from the PDF, and you'll have this available for download. The nine part about eQUEST is we have this all measured out for you. Of course in reality that’s typically not going to happen. But in eQUEST, because you get the DWG drawings, you draw this out and all of these dimensions are automatically determined for you. But one thing that we like to do is mark up the drawing somehow so that we can know what window is on which wall and so on. And here we have the windows drawn out. And we cover this in the video setting up the file, and believe me after setting up this many windows, or watching somebody set up this many windows, it's not very difficult. So if you look at the top of the screen here, where we have four offices, and you look at the top of the screen here where we have one large office with the same number of windows, what we applied there is a thermal block, and this is just because this is VAV system. So in this case, each one of these rooms gets its own VAV box in reality. But we're not modeling for design when we're modeling for LEED. Sometimes you’re doing both, but typically you're just modeling for LEED and for energy. And so for one, you can lump all of these into just one VAV box and that’s considered accurate. In fact, there’s this concept of thermal blocks that’s defined in Appendix G. And basically thermal blocks need to be the same room type, these are all offices right here. They need to be the same room type, and if they have glazed walls, which these all have windows on the wall, and so do these offices. If they have glazed walls, the wall direction cannot vary by more than 45 degrees. And so this wall is approximately 35 degrees different than this wall. And so these admin offices were also allowed to be lumped into one large office. And so when we talk about zoning, well each spacing eQUEST when you have a VAV system automatically gets its own VAV box. But for LEED we don’t actually have to count all of the VAV boxes, provided that we do implement our thermal blocks. And so here we have the restrooms combined into one thermal block since they're on the same schedule. And so there’s more to thermal blocks. Remember when we discussed unmet hours and we said the number of rooms, when the number of rooms goes up, the number of unmet hours statistically is also going to increase. Okay so what’s the purpose of thermal blocks besides something like that? Well one of the things that they do is if we can go from 50 rooms to 25, it's going to speed up the simulation itself when we click the calculate button. Which doesn't sound like that big of a deal because this project calculates in like 30 seconds. But keep in mind we could be modeling something like the Burj Dubai. And when we model for LEED we have to run this thing five times because we have to run the proposed building, and then we have to run the four rotations of the baseline. So speeding up the simulation is somewhat important. Probably not the most important reason that we have to model thermal blocks, though. So as we already mentioned, thermal blocks lower unmet hours. The other thing that thermal blocks do is they simplify your systems and your plants. And so we haven’t gotten this far, but one of the things we pointed out is for instance the zoning, with the VAV boxes. For instance, if we go up here, if all of these rooms shared a VAV box, then we don’t need to mess with the zoning anyway; we just lump them all into one space, and they automatically get one VAV box. And so it's simplifies that, but there’s actually more to it. In the baseline believe, depending on the system type that we're going to be required, you may end up having to specify a lot less systems because there’s this rule that for system types 1-4, you have to model one system per thermal block. And so in eQUEST what that would mean is instead of modeling something like 50 systems, we end up having to model something like 20, which is obviously half the work. And on top of that, this is a little bit complex, but it actually somehow magically, well it's a mathematic certainty, it yields more points. And the reason being is the equipment specified is based on the size of basically the amount of cooling that you need for a particular thermal block. And larger equipment is actually allowed a lower default efficiency, or a worse efficiency in eQUEST. So if we had to model a roof top for each one of these rooms, we would have five small rooftops. And each one of those roof tops just say would be allowed an EER (Energy Efficiency Ratio) of 11. Well the way that LEED is worded, if we merge all of these into a thermal block, and we are allowed to model one rooftop instead, and that rooftop is now approximately five times the size of the others. So now we have a midsized roof top, and that roof top is only required to have an EER of nine. And so the larger rooftop is actually allowed a worse efficiency which is a good thing in the baseline building. And so obviously we haven’t got that far yet, but thermal blocks are one of the first things that you're going to have to create. And they're sometimes a bit annoying to create. But they save you so much time in the future, especially with the unmet hours, the simulation. They also save you the time of going through the model and creating a system, which there’s a number of complexities that each system brings up. And then on top of that, it can yield more points.