Walkthrough of OpenStudio

[00:00:00] In the last video, we completed the building geometry in SketchUp and we’re now ready to move into the OpenStudio application.  I’m going to open the file I saved in the last video, Video2.  So we’re now ready to continue our energy modeling workflow in the OpenStudio application.  You can do everything in this application except for view the geometry, and that’s where SketchUp comes in.  So the OpenStudio application has a layout with three main parts.  On the left hand side, there’s a vertical navigation bar.  There are a number of pages and you can step through these pages in a logical way.  We start on the Site page, work our way through to the Run Simulation page, and finally we review the results.

[00:01:04] In the main central area of the software, we can drill into the details of the particular page that we’re on.  So here on the Site page, we can set away the file and import some design days.  Each page generally has a number of tabs, so here we have where the file and design days.  There are two more tabs that we won’t go into in this course: Life Cycle Costs and Utility Bills.  But generally, each of the pages through the application has a number of tabs.  On the right hand side of the window, there is another navigation area and that separates out three distinct levels in sort of a information hierarchy.  There is information defined at My Model, there’s information at the library level, and at the bottom of the hierarchy is the information of a particular object.  So if we have an object selected, we can generally edit the details in this right hand pane here.

[00:02:07] Now this right hand pane navigation area doesn’t make a lot of sense here on the Site page, but for consistency, that area is available on every page.  It will make a lot more sense once we get onto the next page looking at schedules.  So we’ll look at it again when you move onto the next video.  But for now, here on the Site page, there are a couple of things we can do.  First of all, let’s download the weather file that we need for this energy model.  We’re going to use the Denver/Stapleton weather files.  Following the link from the Download Weather Files, the link provided in the software there, we get to an EnergyPlus website and that points us to another link here which we can follow to grab the weather data.  So we’ll follow again North and Central America, USA, Colorado.  And for Colorado, let’s look for the Denver/Stapleton zip file.

[00:03:30] So download that zip file and save it somewhere on your computer and unpack it.  Now the place that I recommend you unpack that to is where I will show next, which is the EnergyPlus Weather Data folder.  So if you’ve installed EnergyPlus on your machine, that folder location will be installed and that is a logical plus to store all your weather files.  So I’m going to select the Denver/Stapleton EnergyPlus weather file and I’ve now set that for this model.  The optional measure tags here to set climate zone 5B for Denver and I’ll set to climate zone 5.  We can separately import some design days.  Now these will come along with the zip file that you just downloaded.  I’m going to set the Denver/Stapleton design days.  I’m also going to set the calendar year to 2015 and I’m going to let the first day of the year float to whatever’s in the weather file.

[00:04:39] So that is a very quick demonstration of the basic layout of the OpenStudio application.  We’ve got the main navigation bar down the left hand side that helps guide us through our workflow, there’s the main area in the center of the page, and there’s also a additional hierarchical navigation area: the right hand pane here on the right hand side.  There are a few more buttons I’d like to draw your attention to each page has a green button for Add New Object, Copy Selected Object, or Remove Selected Objects button.  There’s also Purged Unused Objects button.  Those will appear on each of the pages.

[00:05:24] Now for a quick gotcha: tips and tricks, something to very much be mindful of when working in OpenStudio.  Let me show you by demonstrating.  Say I go ahead and delete all of these design days and then I think, “Whoops, I didn’t want to do that.  Can I undo it?”  So if I type Control Z for undo, nothing happens.  If I look for an Undo function here in the menus, again, there is no Undo.  So that is something that is relatively unusual in the modern kind of era of software.  Pretty much every other software I work with has an Undo function.  Unfortunately, OpenStudio doesn’t so what that means is you’re going to have to make regular saves of your project and then you’re going to have to keep track of where you got to at your last saved sort of checkpoint.  You might want to save your files with an indication of where it was at, make branches, et cetera.  You’re going to have to manage checkpoints so that if you do make a mistake, you can go back to the last saved file because there is no Undo.