Your comments are very good.
That is why an engineer working in a lab can never get rich.
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If EPlus is no good for the LEED certification, the development team may not receive the funding.
A gold certificate does not necessary mean that the building is energy saving.
But, the builder can sell the building easier or get 'green' grants.
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We used to use slide rule, set square and a drawing board to see how the shadows would be cast on a bulding. Try to build a scaled model and rotate it. Now, the OpenStudio can do all these in seconds, after the building envelop is entered.
This is why I do not really care about the real world HVAC equipment match. Purchased air, heating and cooling provides most of the energy usage evaluation need. Ground surface temperature calculation and TMY information provide the basic design requirements. External shading design, building location and orientation and landscaping provide real energy saving ideas.
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Sizing is done in various stages. Autocalculate, and autosize is to speed up the use of the software. The final value depends on the user experience in using the result and the skill of estimating margins, and knowledge of existing equipment and envrionment. (The Professional Skill and Experience.)
The first domestic refrigerator is an ice box, with a block of ice in the upper compartment.
(Purchased cooling)
In the 1960's, I was involved in a system which was purposely under sized to save capital cost. An empty space (ice room) was reserved next to the air handling room. This empty room was the margin for sizing error. When extra cooling supply is needed, this room can be filled with ice blocks to provide cooling of the inlet air and circulating return air.
As far as I know, this room has never been filled with ice. If this room was not provided, the equipment would not have been approved by the tendering requirement.
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On the missing words and mis-spelled words, I have this to add.
The hotmail has two cursors. One follows the typing text input. The other is resting some where as an invisible mouse cursor. When I wanted to change some text, I move he mouse cursor to the selected location and click once. The cursor moved. But when I start typing, the character does not appear. I click the mouse again the charecter now shows.
What happened to the first few characters I have typed? It went to the location where the mouse cursor was parked. If I had used the delete key a few times, some characters were deleted somewhere in the text. When you see some text that is misspelled or does not make sense, it could be the hotmail editor playing tricks.
This is very ann
Let's understand again what simulations are good at and what not.
Early Design:
Simulations at this stage are good at saying that this works better than that.
They are reasonable at saying how much better this works than that.
They are bad at saying how much this or that has of an impact on the total building energy usage at peak consumption times or of the total summed consumption over a year.
Actually, a simulation's potential impact on final building performance is most useful here, to look at the broad effects of things like shading, geometry and orientation, envelope characteristics. Sadly, as Architects are occupied with selling pretty pictures to win as many project stages as possible at this point, the aesthetics and effort to optimize this robs time from technical efforts, meaning the early design phase is where simulation gets employed the least.
Middle Design:
Bloody hell! We've won the project because we are the cheapest...we are the cheapest because we're the "fastest". We need to work like mad people now to meet our unrealistic deadlines. Simu...what?
Finished Design:
Oh, and by the way we've promised a LEED certified building, GOLD, to the owner and need to find out what we need to do to achieve this. Construction begins in 2 weeks. Oh. Looks like we have to do a simulation.
And that's why, as Jim pointed out, most modelers are busy doing what simulations are the worst at...trying to reflect real life buildings after they're completely designed, but before they are built and commissioned.
MORAL OF THE STORY
If you have the best ideas in the world, no one will know them if you can't sell them. Sales rules the world. Ironically, the people with the good ideas are often bad at selling.
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