TRACE 700 Building Set Up Introduction

We’re going to cover in this lesson how to build the building, essentially from the drawings and we’re building this building from a load design so we can actually start the course.

Creating a New File in TRACE 700

First thing we’re going to do is open up TRACE 700, and we’re going to create a new
project. We’re going to give this a really original name of “LEED Office.” That
takes us to the first TRACE screen, and the first thing we’re going to do is give the
project a name. We’re actually going to call this “Proposed,” in other words this is the building that we intend to build.

Next, we’ll select the weather information. Later we’re going to have to do this more in depth, but right now we’re just going to select Chicago. We don’t have to worry about the overrides right now unless of course they were specified with the design.

So the next stage in the building is actually the most important part of a design model, it’s the most important part especially for a LEED model, is templates. To launch templates we go to the template button or we can double click, and we’ll just double click and open up templates. A lot of people will want to dive in. Really before you do this, you should actually look over your building and make a list of the space types. It sounds redundant but it will save you a lot of time, and you’ll see when we go over this. The goal with templates is to have as many templates as needed and no more.

Many people start from the internal load template, but that’s actually the one with probably the most diversity. We want to start with the template that’s the most basic, which is typically the thermostat or the construction template. We’ll start with construction. And so, we can edit the default, but what we can do here is create a new one. In this case since we know there’s only one construction type, we’re going to edit the default. It’s going to ask us if we wish to rename it, and yes. We’re going to call this “General Building,” since this particular construction type applies to all of the spaces. So, we’ll just go through our little document here and we’ll select the roof, and that’s four inch lightweight concrete and that’s already specified, and we have to get the U-value. This being in Chicago, it’s pretty well insulated. And one thing we want to point out is that the construction type itself is important. Many people think that the U-factor is good enough. You at least want to get something similar in the construction type because TRACE takes into account the mass of the building, among several other parameters.

The next thing we want to select just going down the line is the wall. And that was four inch lightweight essentially block. And we know that it’s highly insulated so we’ll select the one with insulation and we’re going to override this.

Then we have partitions. And we’ll just select the one inch wood frame partition. Basically, with partitions it’s really only the U-factor that matters because they’re inside the building and TRACE doesn’t consider their mass in the same way as it does for a wall. So even though we’re going to have glass partitions in the building, we can call it anything here and we just want to get the U-value right.

Then we have our standard doors which is already selected, and we just have to override the U-value. We do have some glass doors. We’re going to address that in a minute. For now we’re just talking about the opaque doors. So we have no skylights so we don’t have to enter anything there, and we just want to enter the window which was double-coated, and we have a U-value of .25 and we have a shading coefficient of .36. One thing you want to remember is to get the height for the wall and the floor-to-floor, and that’s 12 and we have a 3 foot plenum. So effectively right now, we’re done. The one thing that we have not modeled are the glass doors. The glass doors are only present on the vestibules. Copy this template and we’ll call this “Vestibules.” And we just want to change the window type to triple clear and the U-value is .21 and the shading coefficient is .4, so we can apply that.

The next step, just keeping things simple for now, is to go to the thermostat template and we’ll call this “General Building” and we already have 75 and 70, and so this is for load design we won’t even worry about the drip points right now. The rest of these inputs here should actually be left as they are, especially for load design. When we get into LEED, we can enter the cooling schedule, but we don’t have to. And for the humidity inputs here, just leave them as they are. Many times people don’t know what they are, so they decide to change them, and that’s not the best practice. Ok, so we can apply that.

Now we have essentially the internal loads and air flow templates to complete, and it doesn’t matter what order we do them in right now. Basically, there’s going to be a lot of rooms in each of them. So, let’s just get started and move onto the air flow. And since we know this is an office building, let’s make the default room an office. You may or may not want to run Standard 62 In your file. Many firms actually do these calculations outside of TRACE 700. TRACE is fully capable of doing them within TRACE. And just to show how it’s done for a LEED file, we’re going to select “yes.” First thing we’re going to do before we even look at the type is select the “cooling easy,” and that is a “ceiling cooling supply ceiling return,” and the heating easy is the same thing, less than a 15 degree Delta-T.

Maybe there are a few hours here and there where that doesn’t happen, but we’ll assume that it’s less than 15. For the type, we can simply select the Type Menu, and I just hit “o” which will take us to the first “o” which is “Office Space.” We’ll assume this is a pressurized building and there is no infiltration just to keep things simple. So let’s apply that.

Now, we have two types of office spaces but in terms of ventilation, they’re going to be the same. So we can move on, we can copy this, make it a “conference,” select the type, hit the “C” key, and we’ll make it conference. You may notice here that there are some options here for EA Credit 2, and we don’t want to select those right now, we just want to go for the standard. We’ll apply that. Now we can copy this again, call this “Corridor,” and we’ll already be right next to it, so select “Corridor” and apply.

The next section is for stairs which are effective corridors as well. So we’ll know that we’ll use the “Corridor Stair,” just so we know that we’ll use this for the stairs. So we can copy this again. We have a mechanical room. And you won’t find mechanical in this list, but you will find electrical, so we can select that. If we go ahead and copy that we can move ahead and move to our next category, which is our printing lab. Effectively this is a computer lab. So we’re almost done with these so far, and we can copy that again, and now we have the reception. But, if we look at the reception, or what would be the main entry lobby, that’s the same as the office, so we’ll just cancel that and remember to use the office as the reception. So finally we have our cafeteria. And remember to copy this, otherwise we’ll get stuck entering the Standard 62 parameters again, so we’ll copy this and call it “Cafeteria.” And we can select Cafeteria from the menu and apply. So now we have all our airflow templates entered.

Lastly, before we put together the room template (remember you can only put the room template together after you’ve done the first four), so let’s go to internal loads. Again the first one we’ll just call “Office.”

TRACE 700 Templates

Remember, this is for load design, so all we’re doing is setting up the basics. We’re going to call this “Open Office,” because we have different lighting power densities. So, right in here we’ll select office. And we have our lighting and the recess fluorescent 80% already. Just select .8. For miscellaneous loads, we’re just going to assume 1 watt per square foot across the whole building for now. Apply that and copy that and we’ll make “Office Closed,” and the main change that we know right now is the .9 watts per square foot. And actually what we can do, since these are more Admin Offices, we can design these for two people. So copy that again and we’ll make a conference, select conference room, and we have 1 watt per square foot for lighting, and we’ll apply and copy that. We have corridor and we’ll make that .5 watts per square foot. And we’ll say that there’s always four people in any of these rooms, that’s just the design factor. So that takes us to the mechanical space which is .8 for lighting and here we have a mech room.

If you don’t have these you can actually create these in the library. You’ll notice that I may have things that you do not, and that’s just from different files that I’ve worked on and different libraries that we’ve made. In fact, that’s not all of them. We clean our libraries up every couple weeks to keep it small. So we can apply that. Now we have our printing lab, and for people we can select general office space. We just have to get the lighting correct, and this actually happens to be the same as our open office but that’s hard to remember. In this case, we can just make it our own template. Ok, almost done. This is probably the worst part of setting up a file, in terms of tediousness. And sometimes we can say this is what interns are for.

All the interns watching this video probably don’t appreciate that, but I’m not sure if anyone is watching this video because we didn’t make it part of the course. Anyway, let’s get back to work. We have the printing lab and the reception, which is the lobby. Copy this and call it reception. We’ll leave that general office space and essentially all we want to do is change the lighting type. And finally, we have our cafeteria. Select cafeteria, it gets pretty crowded there at lunch, and we have .85 watts per square foot. Apply that. Remember this is for a load design model. We’re not talking about energy, that’s why all the schedules are left at cooling design. This is effectively what people will get when they start a LEED project. Apply that and now we have all our templates made. Now we will make our room templates.