[Bldg-sim] Are the eQUEST complience analysis and LEED export features trustworthy

[Jeremiah Crossett]

Hello,
This is my first post to the {SIM} thread, so please forgive any repetition
from previous posts that I may be unaware of.
I have a LEED compliance modeling job I am working on and have attempted to
use the "Compliance analysis" tool in eQUEST.
The results where at first encouraging, as it created the building
rotations as expected, but upon further analysis I lowered the that the
baseline buildings that should be at ASHRAE 2007 where using about 30% more
energy then a  building that has zero insulation, standard lighting
watts/sqft, standard hot water use, standard process loads etc... The
building that is not at code energy costs are in the sixty thousand range,
and the 0,90,180,270 average that should be at code is in
the ninety thousand range. This %30 savings for the building that has zero
insulation over the building that has been auto generated to be complaint
with ASHRAE/LEED shows that for some reason the building that is not at
code uses 30% less then the building that is suppose to be at code, and I
am sure that the software is wrong.
So I decided to not use the compliance analysis tool, in favor of creating
my proposed building in the D&D wizard, then making a copy that I then
specified ASHRAE compliance manually, and then copying my manually created
compliant building for each rotation. Then figuring that the "Export LEED
Results CSV" would be a simple way to average my manually created rotations
and compare them to my proposed building.
I made a google spreadsheet that I can copy/paste the Export LEED Results
CSV to for graphing of results.
This worked great at first, until I updated my proposed building with the
latest from the design team. Now when I Export LEED Results CSV it is
outputting zero costs for all of the buildings! The view simulation results
show costs, and the Export LEED Results CSV shows kWh usage, therms use,
and costs for Natural Gas, but leaves all of the costs of electric at ZERO,
also the feature in the Export LEED Results CSV there is a percentage cost
savings that produces results that are obviously out of whack. The first
run I only had the percentage cost savings issue and figured I could work
around the one bug, but now that it is saying that electricity is "free" I
am very concerned with the accuracy of any of the LEED compliance tools in
eQUEST.

Here is the link to my google spreadsheet with the results.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkGqvJNjrYpldF9iTFlqb1F0dV9nRlpwSDJHbnBpcEE

I have read the PDF published on the subject, and am very curios if the
compliance analysis tool is something that you believe to work correctly?
(I would be happy to find out I made some error, but can not find any such
errors on my part.
If anyone has any insight it would be greatly appreciated.




-- 
Jeremiah D. Crossett
Setanta Energy & Water
Phone: 503-688-8951
Email: jeremiah at setnrgh2o.com
http://www.setnrgh2o.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.onebuilding.org/pipermail/bldg-sim-onebuilding.org/attachments/20111214/aef8ce38/attachment.htm>