Options and Outputs in TRACE 700

In this lesson, many options in Trace 700 are discussed, including:
• Sorting rooms/lists alphanumerically
• Changing unit systems
• Changing the load methodology
• Entered values reports
• Energy Parameters
• The Trace 700 visualizer for exporting custom outputs
• Changing the default weather location

No matter how efficient your plant is, or how great your unloading curves are, it is also important to make these models efficiently. Efficient use of TRACE 700 comes with an understanding of what the program can do and how it can be used more efficiently. This comes with a good knowledge of the menus in TRACE 700 and the options it can provide.

With that said, let’s take a look at the options menu. TRACE 700 can perform in English or metric units, which means we don’t have to perform the conversion if for instance we're dealing with an international customer. Another important feature of the options menu is the fact that we can sort lists alphanumerically or as entered. If we look at our rooms, there is no clear alphanumeric order. After a hundred rooms or so are displayed as they were entered, it becomes very difficult to find a particular room. Displaying them alphanumerically will make this much simpler.

Another option in the menu that can ease your life with TRACE 700 is under the view menu, there’s an option for the entered values. Selecting this option allows you to print out a detailed report of everything entered in TRACE 700. This can be used for your records or to show people exactly what you've entered. Again, that’s under the view menu, and entered values.

While TRACE 700 has hundreds, if not thousands, of input value, there are also a number of options that can be changed. These can be accessed by going to the actions menu and selecting change load parameters. We’ll start with change load parameters.

The load parameters allow you to define the first and last month as well as the peak hour. For instance, if you wanted to lock in a peak hour, and say that your building peaked at hour 15, we could lock that in here. We can also rotate the building if, for instance, we had entered a building not realizing that true north was off by 15 degrees.

There are four checkboxes here. Two of them are checked by default but the other two are equally important. Allowing energy recovery/transfer at design, when checked, allows an energy recovery device to meet part of the design load and therefore smaller air conditioning equipment when you install an energy recovery device. The other checkbox forces the VAV minimum to be always greater than or equal to the nominal ventilation during design. While this isn’t checked by default, this should almost always be checked when modeling a VAV system.

The other field here should not be tampered with too much. The air flow unity should be typically kept to actual air flow units. While the methodologies can be changed here, they should not be changed without adequate knowledge of these methodologies.

Finally, the infiltration, the outside film and the terrain can all be entered with several options. For instance, a terrain can be set near the ocean, or into the center of a large city, and observe the heat island effect.

Finally, there are also daylight savings options in TRACE 700. If we go back to actions, and select change energy parameters, this gives us an option of changing to full year weather, changing the calendar code, changing the energy simulation months, which I typically don’t recommend. It also gives us an option of changing the resource utilization factors. The resource utilization factors affect the amount of source energy versus site energy, which is available on some of the energy reports.

Finally, there is an option to link air side coil capacities to equipment capacities, and when there are multiple alternatives, we have the option to apply ECB/PRM rules to fan sizing. And define which standard it's a part of, whether it's Ashrae 90.1-2004, or Ashrae 90.1-2007. This will be discussed further during the leed [00:05:10] training.

There are additional options fields in TRACE 700 that we can edit. That can be done by going to file, and options. However, if you're already in a file, you'll have to first close that file, then go to file, and you'll know have the options under customize settings. In the customize settings, we can change a number of parameters. We can change the way TRACE 700 opens. We can change the summary estimates. Probably most commonly, we can change the default map, as well as the default location. If you're sick of looking at La Crosse, Wisconsin, you can find your most common location, and type that in here exactly as it is specified on the map. The other common thing is to change the default projects directory. For instance, if you want to save from another folder, you change that here, and it will automatically do so. You can also change the default methodologies, as well as the view type, which we will discuss later. Here you can also edit your registration information, which will show up on your reports. So you enter your name, your company, and your customer i.d. Once we make these changes, they will not start until the next time you start TRACE 700.