First thing we’re going to do, and we’re going to do this for reference, is copy Alternative 1. We covered Alternatives in another lesson but right here, we’re just going to make sure that this is all based on Alternative 1. What this does here is now Alternative 2 will not change when we make changes to Alternative 1. As we mentioned, with the water-source heat pump set up, we’re only going to be able to model one system and two plants: a cooling plant and a heating plant.
Right now, what we’re going to do is leave this at incremental heat pump and we can change this in a bit. But we are going to illustrate how we would actually make this into a single air-to-air heat pump plant which we can easily switch to water-source heat pump. I hope you follow that logic. This is where we’re going to change the air-to-air heat pumps to be modeled as one large unit and we can compare this to Alternative 2, where we have this broken down.
We assign all of our rooms to this system and we keep our zoning the same. One thing we want to make sure is that the cooling coil location is at the zone level. If it was at the room level that would mean that we would get six cooling coils or six individual heat pump units that Trace is actually going to model. Again, the reason that we broke this into separate systems in the initial case was so that we could model multiple efficiency plants. When we put these all into one system, we assume that Trace is going to model the energy, via a single plant, which we lose a little bit of accuracy but we are going to test to see how much accuracy we do indeed lose.
So we have that set up. Now let’s go to our plants.
This is kind of fun, deleting these. There’s something about it that’s stress-relieving.
Now, let’s check this out. So here we have our main heat pump and we have the backup heating source set correctly. Essentially, right now, we have everything modeled the same except for one thing. We have to take into account the fact that these five cooling plants in Alternative 2 are now one cooling plant in Alternative 1 and the efficiency is set to 11 EER, where in fact, in the other scenario, we had 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 EER, all for different sized heat pumps. How do we set this new weighted average efficiency? We’ll show you how to do that.