[Equest-users] Team eQUEST: Lowdown Showdown Report

Thu Nov 12 06:46:31 PST 2015

Hi Joe,
I performed the daylighting analysis for the eQuest project.  I used SPOT Pro from daylightinginnovations. This program uses radiance as the calculation engine behind an Excel interface. SPOT includes luminaire import (IES files) and photo sensor placement optimization.  SPOT generates lighting schedules for direct import into the DOE2 model.  Those schedules produced a significant reduction in lighting energy over the native eQuest daylighting analysis.

SPOT also includes the rvu rendering program for examining your designs.

[cid:image003.png at 01D09C46.E75BA0D0]
Christopher Jones, P.Eng.
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From: Equest-users [mailto:equest-users-bounces at lists.onebuilding.org] On Behalf Of Joe Huang
Sent: Wednesday, November 11, 2015 10:47 AM
To: equest-users at lists.onebuilding.org
Subject: Re: [Equest-users] Team eQUEST: Lowdown Showdown Report

Nick, Aaron, Cara, Pasha, Chris,

I'd like to add my congratulations to those of others for your great work at the Lowdown Showdown.  It's very impressive what your team was able to achieve on a strictly voluntary basis, and shows how much innovative modeling can be done with eQUEST/DOE-2 .

For my personal curiosity, I'd like to ask the team:
(1) how much of your work was done using eQUEST "out of the box", and how much of it tweaking the underlying DOE-2.2 engine? This question applies mostly to the modeling of low-energy HVAC strategies, esp. the solar chimneys.
(2) what was the motivation to use Radiance to calculate daylighting instead of the native daylighting capabilities in DOE-2?  (this is not meant as a challenge - I simply have never looked into the strengths/weaknesses of the DOE-2 daylighting calculation)
(3) great to see the multi-variant analysis of 60,000 runs, especially the colorful 3-D surface plot :-)   What were the two axes being plotted?  There are those who dismiss slow runtimes as just an annoyance, but my experience is that fast runtimes open up whole new ways of analysis.  When DOE-2 runtimes got down to a few seconds, I started doing a lot more experimental design.

I also suggest that you send your post to BLDG-SIM to get more distribution, especially among readers less familiar with eQUEST.

Once again, congrats!

Joe

Joe Huang

White Box Technologies, Inc.

346 Rheem Blvd., Suite 205A

Moraga CA 94556

yjhuang at whiteboxtechnologies.com<mailto:yjhuang at whiteboxtechnologies.com>

http://weather.whiteboxtechnologies.com for simulation-ready weather data

http://www.whiteboxtechnologies.com

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"building energy simulations at your fingertips"
On 11/10/2015 7:52 PM, Nicholas Caton wrote:
This year at the 2015 ASHRAE Energy Modeling Conference, there was a “Lowdown Showdown” design competition.  Voluntary teams representing most commercial energy simulation software packages & platforms tried to tackle a relatively open design challenge to bring a building (of our own design) down to net-zero energy.  The relatively small team representing eQUEST/DOE-2 won an award by popular vote for the “Most Creative” design solution!

The eQUEST team had 5 members (all CC’ed on this email thread) - you may recognize a few as frequent contributors over these mailing lists:

•       Aaron Powers

•       Cara Sloat

•       Pasha Korber-Gonzales

•       Chris Jones

•       Nick Caton

I served as ‘coach’ for the team, and in that context am very proud to share some new information concerning our collaborative efforts, design process, and the final ‘product’ with the greater eQUEST-users community.  Those who were able to attend the conference experienced a live presentation by representatives for the teams and a panel discussion with all of the coaches to field questions/challenges from the audience, but time was quite constrained.  This this is an opportunity to share with those who could not attend and to convey/discuss things in more detail.

Attached is a ‘poster’ that covers much of the information we presented for the project, and outlines the process we followed over the ~9 weeks we had to collaborate.  We accomplished a great deal in the time we had, in spite of a late start due to some difficulties in assembling the minimum # of members required.  The team met weekly via VOIP calls (Skype/join.me<http://join.me>) to coordinate efforts, present individual findings, and to simply share knowledge and relate/compare experiences.  As a group, each individual identified and contributed challenges/problems/systems of interest early on, and as a group we made it a goal to incorporate those elements into our project along the way.  This ‘spirit’ to tackle new/interesting issues and to avoid “easy/obvious” solutions lead to some interesting design decisions along the way!

I initially thought I would make it a personal goal to ensure the project would be engaging, informative, and rewarding for every participant, but I learned that with the right group that is going to happen anyway!  My only regret is that more of my friends and colleagues in the industry did not get to participate.  I sincerely hope when the next opportunity comes along, more individuals from this community will take the initiative to participate – it was very much worth our time!

If anybody would like to learn more or ask questions, please freely reply to this email thread!

Kind regards,

~Nick

NICK CATON, P.E.
Owner

Caton Energy Consulting
  306 N Ferrel
  Olathe, KS  66061
  office:  785.410.3317
www.catonenergy.com<http://www.catonenergy.com>

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