[Equest-users] Team eQUEST: Lowdown Showdown Report

[Joe Huang]

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
http://weather.whiteboxtechnologies.com for simulation-ready weather data
http://www.whiteboxtechnologies.com
(o) (925)388-0265
(c) (510)928-2683
"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
>
>
>
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