Here we have our load design and right now, what we want to do is get this load design building ready for energy calculations. We are going to use energy protocol for a LEED model because the theory defined for the LEED provides very good assumptions for any energy model. Most people want to jump in and copy the building right away, but first we want to make some simplifications to prep the load design file for energy analysis. While we don’t have to do this, it will cut our trouble shooting time in half and prevent numerous headaches, especially in a LEED model.
Prep for Energy Analysis
There are several things that come into play that are different in a LEED model verses a load design model. Many people never think about this, but certain things that you leave blank because you are letting TRACE figure that out, you now know. For instance, now we have equipment selections and we need to apply those.
But before we can prep the file for energy analysis, we need to prep the file to prep the file more efficiently. What do I mean by that? Well, one of the things that we have already done (but you may have not on your computer) we want to sort lists alphanumerically. One of our best practices is to number your items. This makes things easier and we’ll see that as we go along. You don’t have to do this but it’s something that we would recommend.
Weather Schedules
The next thing that you need for a LEED file is, you need 8760 Weather and TRACE does not use full year weather by default, however we have to keep in mind that we have to run this file a number of times and full year weather files take several times longer to run, so let’s keep it at reduces for now but the one thing we want to do just to make sure we get our loads right, is we go into weather overrides and we have to select our ASHRAE overrides per LEED. We have 1% and 99.6%. That’s just out of ASHRAE standard 90.1. In this particular example, we’re following standard 90.1 2007 because that’s what’s being currently used and will be used for quite some time. So, now we have essentially prepped the file to get into it—just a few minor things.
Starting the Load Design File
And where do we start? Well, one of the main things that we want to do is we want to make this file ready for energy. And if we look at the templates we’ll notice that in the first template the schedules are set to cooling only design which is not a realistic schedule and you should never use that for an energy schedule. I mean, never use that, unless you’re doing something for NASA and they have some secret experiment that’s running 24/7. Literally, you never use the cooling design schedule for energy. I’ve never seen an example where it’s good besides the one example that I saw at a NASA facility built to run all the time.