I am a drafting technician in HVAC design on public projects (Schools, hospitals, restaurants, county buildings, and some miscellaneous others)
After getting used to the pollination plugin, it’s been such a great help in importing building geometry into IES VE and even Trace700 (when I was looking into having a comparison to check against).
This considered, I’ve noticed that Pollination pays attention to phasing when selecting Revit elements (windows, doors, and room/spaces). That brought me to assume that IES VE would mind the phasing as well.
My story takes a turn now; after committing to a year with IES VE, I learned yesterday that the T24 Compliance calculations in the VE are limited to New Construction Only. This made my heart sink, as 60% of what my office consults for in design is remodel. I NEED EXISTING, ALTERED, and ADDITIONAL WORK!!
Previously, we used Trace700 (Despite it being from last century) for heat loads and Energy pro 9 for T24 compliance forms. VE felt like a huge time saver to have everything exported from pollination in <20 minutes and preliminary loads maybe 20 minutes later with T24 compliance forms just around the corner.
My questions to you ( those that consistently generate Title 24 Compliance Forms):
What Heat load and energy software do you use in your design process?
For those on IES VE, does your design only pertain to new buildings?
For those not with VE, what do you use? Does is work well from our Pollination export files out of Revit models?
And my request for any IESVE customers:
Please reach out to their support team (support@iesve.com) and request that the development team releases T24 Compliance Type to include “Existing | Addition / Alterations”
Very eager to hear about what the community does in the respective areas.
Hi Josiah, have you spoken with Liam at IES? He may have some suggestions for you. Older versions of IES can export models to CBECC-COM, which you can then upgrade to the latest CBECC. It is still a clunky process, not nearly as fast as the module in Title 24.
For existing buildings/renovations I try to go prescriptive for Title 24 if I can. I’m finding that many of my projects can meet the requirements (it’s usually the new construction that have issues with prescriptive).
Hi Stefan, my office has reached out to Liam, so maybe this older version of IES model exports will be mentioned. Clunky seems okay, but I am in need of a solution for many of the projects we work on. Using IES is great to have both sides in one model along with the visual aid, but unless your proposed method works, we may have to revert to Energy Pro 9 in the mean time.
Funny enough, one of my colleagues finally was able to get a passing and relatively passing prescriptive model going on one of our most complicated HVAC systems yet. Quite the project to learn on.
I am still getting some feedback from IES Support on best methods for tabular data changing, as there were 23 layers to modify multiple times. It seemed that re running the calculations would reset some values, so my colleague had many headaches over 2-3 weeks of trouble shooting.
In considering CBECC-COM, do you have any recommendations on learning resources? On initial search, looks like an open-source software. I’ll have to do some deeper diving on research to see how user friendly it is.
My understanding is that EnergyPro is basically just a wrapper for CBECC-COM for Title 24 Calculations at least. So it should look familiar, tho it will likely be a slower tool to use. But depending how much info gets transferred from IES it could be worth doing.
Pollination can also output geometry to CBECC directly, but then you are stuck defining all of the envelope and HVAC assignments manually which is pretty time consuming. I’ve saved time using a text editor and regex find/replace commands, and I know firms have developed in house python scripts to speed things up, but that’s quite an investment.
Sounds like a great start. I appreciate your input.
Seems like starting in Revit, then exporting to IES via Pollination, data entry, and then exporting to CBECC will be what I try next. What an exciting 4 step process!
If it saves time from building Trace700 model, repeating building EP model, and entering systems from manual input all over… I will be thrilled!!