[Bldg-sim] simulation software

[Karen Walkerman]

Hi All,

I too have spent many frustrating nights trying to figure out what is wrong
with my eQuest models.  After all the brow-beating, I have always come to
the conclusion that something was wrong with my inputs, not with the
software, and been able to remedy the issue.  Not true for Trace700.  I
spent about a year with Trace, found a number of bugs (some of which the
company is now fixing), got frustrated with the long (hour-plus) simulation
times, and limitation to modeling 4 alternatives in one file.  Yes it's nice
that there's someone to call when you have questions, but they don't always
know the answer.  I had people telling me to check my fan energy inputs when
the odd data I was getting had nothing to do with fans.

In addition, I often have trouble with data corruption when editing
templates.  Granted, templates are a great idea and I wish eQuest had a
similar option, but when your inputs are corrupted and you have to go
through and check room by room to see what remains...  not a fun process.

Trace700 has no visual feedback for window, wall, room or roof geometry.
This can be a pain.

I also believe that their water source heat-pump system does not share
energy in the loop properly.  I created a test-file, consisting of two
10X10X10 rooms.  One room had a large cooling load, the other a large
heating mode.  Neither had any external surface areas.  The total energy
required to condition the spaces should have been much lower for heat pumps
than for fain coils... but, they were practically identical.  I sent the
model to Trace, and they argued that this was not a fair test of their
software????

So... though eQuest can be frustrating at times, I gladly use it over Trace.

~Karen~
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.onebuilding.org/pipermail/bldg-sim-onebuilding.org/attachments/20071218/f81778dd/attachment.htm