Now what we’re going to cover right away is the completion of prepping the proposed. We’re only going to go over one step of a few things rather than covering the entire changes that we would need to make because, for one, it takes a long time, and two, most people only need to see this once.
Let’s first just look at TRACE in general. We can set up a TRACE 700 file for the load design and it can’t be used to calculate energy, but we can set up the file for energy and it still can be used for load design. One of the key components there that makes the difference is under create templates, and it’s under your schedules—right here we have cooling only design. Commonly people use this schedule, they say, “Oh I have a hospital, it’s 24/7, and that means that everything runs around the clock so I will use the cooling only design schedule.” I can tell you that there is never a good time to use the cooling only design schedule for energy. Many times the answer to that is, “Oh, well, then I will use available 100%.” That’s even worse.
Basically you want to select a realistic schedule. You can actually just use the default in TRACE. Many times it’s good to implement your exact schedule but let’s just face it, we’re guessing on this anyway. We can never predict the exact schedule unless it’s maybe specified in the proposal. We want to select the schedules for this, and so often we want to start with the rooms we know for sure, like the offices. We’ll select people, and depending on the office—if it’s open on weekends or not—we can select low rise office or just office. We’ll select this. We’ll do this quickly for the folks that this is way too easy for. This is just something that we have to do. Then we select miscellaneous loads and low rise office.
One thing that people forget to do here, and this is critical, is setting this energy meter to electricity. The reason being is that this is what’s called the receptacles, or this goes into the receptacles, and by default that needs to be 25% of your cost. If we have the energy meter set to none it costs nothing for your plug loads, and therefore it screws that calculation up. We want this to be switched to electricity. We can apply that and the next step would really be to run through all of these. Notice the lighting values—we typically have this defined from somebody, and they might have used the whole building, or they might have used the space by space method, which in this case we use the space by space method. You get something that looks like this. It’s usually not this nice, it’s usually room by room.
Commonly, you could get it in this format, or you generate this yourself. We have that already filled out for load design. Sometimes you need to change it because they used the conservative number for load design lighting, and in reality your lights are actually going to be less. That is something that I’ve encountered that maybe you need to change, but apart from that, it’s just the schedules that need to be changed at this point going from load design to energy.