DOE Single family home template

Is there a way to get the PNNL prototypes for single family home added to the current list of 16 commercial building types? I am using the midrise apartment as a substitute but I am wondering if the residential models can be added as well.

https://www.energycodes.gov/prototype-building-models#Residential

Good question, @ranojoy .

As I understand it, these PNNL prototype models have not been abstracted in a way that their properties can be represented with OpenStudio SpaceTypes. For the DoE Commercial Reference Buildings, the OpenStudio Standards developers do this for us and so we just write a mapper from these SpaceTypes to the ProgramType objects that we ship in Pollination.

So, if the OpenStudio Standards developers (or someone else) does this type of abstraction for us into a SpaceType, then we can definitely translate it into a ProgramType that we ship with Pollination and Ladybug Tools.

But, every time I suggest that we abstract single-family home models like that, there’s usually someone who tells me that it’s “not right” to just take all the plug loads of a prototype single family home model, divide them by the floor area and apply the W/m2 to a bunch of different single-family house models. It seems some modelers are adamant that we must always subject ourselves to the tedious task of specifying individual appliances when it comes to modeling single-family homes. The equivalent of this tedious workflow in Pollination/Ladybug Tools is to use a bunch of Process Load objects for each appliance. So I guess that’s what we’re all “supposed to do” now.

Granted, I don’t really see why abstracting a single family residence is such a bad thing. We did it for the MidriseApartment and HighriseApartment commercial buildings and those have been useful enough. But it’s hard for me to justify doing this abstraction process all on my own without some acknowledgment from other modelers or software developers that this abstraction process is “ok for certain single family residences.”

Thank you Chris. I see the effort involved and dont have a better suggestion. I think I will just use the mid rise template and modify that.

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