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[EnergyPlus_Support] Mandating EnergyPlus: Is it the right tool for energy code compliance?




Good evening from sunny CA. I am new to the forum and freely admit to being in over my head but have taken encouragement from reading through the past few years of posts and seeing newbies become active contributors, especially the repsonse from Nick Caton to Jeremiah Crosset in May of 2012...I forwarded the exchange to everyone in my office... we get few pearls of wisdom freely handed out. So..thanks!


To my question -


On July 1, 2014, California mandated that EnergyPlus be used for our state's energy code (Title 24) compliance. The switch was flipped and we are no longer allowed to use the DOE-2 program most of us had been using (EnergyPro). I am doing as much research as I can but am realizing that perhaps my modeling days are over - and while I am not that old and I am computer literate; I don't know CAD, SketchUp or OpenStudio all that well..and that's OK by me . Modeling was just something I did to suppport my diagnostic testing habit. As I have scoured the internets for training, tips and what-not-to-do's I found this forum and hope that you can offer your opinion.


Is EnergyPlus the right tool for Statewide code compliance? I understand it's an awesome and powerful program, capable of modeling advanced technologies, but is it the right tool for the market? The market being contractors and developers who just want compliance? The run times have been over an hour at times and these aren't extremely complicated multifamily projects - I see horror stories on here about a 300 zone supermarket that took 12 hours to run. Another factor mucks it up as well -

* CA now mandates an integrated design meeting. No problem we've been doing them for a while - but it normally involves me running numerous iterations while I am sitting at the big table with the design team. These are for above-code projects so accuracy in predicting the % over code is paramount..absolutely paramount.  as often tax credits and incentives are on the line which means so is my job, backside and reputation if I get it wrong ( not saying the software I am using is accurate - but it's apples to apples) How do I explian to anyone that I've pressed calculate and now we must wait and wait? and........... by the way in CA we cannot yet model below-grade walls or solar thermal, chilled beams or VRF etc, etc (CA has a twist to the E+ interface called CBECC-COM to meet our code and the software code has yet to be written for these things) From the help desk: 
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