ENERGY DESIGN TOOLS:

This new easy-to-use Design Tool starts by automatically creating a reference house that meets California’s Energy Code. Then it creates a second home that is about 30% more Energy Efficient. You can design and compare up to nine different homes. HEED shows you graphics of how much energy and money and carbon you can save by trying various new Design options or by making Remodeling changes to your home. You can easily draw in the floor plan of your house, then click and drag windows to their best location on each wall. You can add trees and neighboring buildings and see an animation of sun shadows moving across your building. You can select from lists of standard wall and roof construction or you can input custom details. You can add high mass to temper indoor temperatures. Various other Passive Heating and Cooling options are available including ventilation, evaporative cooling, and passive solar heating. You can add Photovoltaic Panels and Solar Hot Water Collectors. HEED can automatically download climate data for thousands of locations around the world. Many kinds of Building Energy Performance data are displayed including bar charts that show how close your building is to Zero Net Energy. For Advanced Users there are more detailed data input options and output display graphics from the original Solar-5. HEED Self-installs on (non-networked) Windows XP or newer and macOS 10.6 or newer systems. A new Tablet version of HEED is also available to run on the MS Surface Pro.

HEED Page

HEED Overview Tutorial (~20 min.)
(Also available in Spanish)

HEED Basic Design Tutorial (~30 min.)
(Also available in Spanish)

HEED Advanced Design Tutorial (~37 min.)
(Also available in Spanish)

Energy Design Tools is now on Twitter and FaceBook.

This new easy-to-use Design Tool starts by automatically creating a reference small non-residential building that meets California’s Energy Code. Then it automatically creates a second building that is usually about 20% more Energy Efficient. You can then copy either one and revise its design and compare it with prior versions of up to nine different designs. SBEED shows you graphics of how much energy and money and carbon you can save by trying various new Design options or by making Remodeling changes or adding Additions to your existing building. You can easily draw in the floor plan of your building, then click and drag windows to their best location on each wall. You can add trees and neighboring buildings and see an animation of sun shadows moving across your building. You can select from lists of standard wall and roof construction or you can input custom details. You can add high mass to temper indoor temperatures. Various other Passive Heating and Cooling options are available including ventilation, evaporative cooling, and passive solar heating. You can add Photovoltaic Panels and Solar Hot Water Collectors. SBEED can automatically download climate data for thousands of locations around the world. For advanced users there are more detailed design data input options and output display graphics from the prior HEED version. Many kinds of Building Energy Performance data are displayed including bar charts that show how close your building is to Zero Net Energy. SBEED uses the original SOLAR-5 computation engine. SBEED Self-installs on (non-networked) Windows XP or newer and macOS 10.6 or newer systems.

SBEED Page

Energy Design Tools is now on Twitter and FaceBook.

Climate Consultant is a simple to use, graphic-based computer program that helps architects, builders, contractor, homeowners, and students understand their local climate. It uses annual 8760 hour EPW format climate data that is made available at no cost by the Department of Energy for thousands of weather stations around the world. Climate Consultant translates this raw climate data into dozens of meaningful graphic displays.

The purpose is not simply to plot climate data, but rather to organize and represent this information in easy-to-understand ways that show the subtle attributes of climate, and its impact on built form. The goal is to help users create more energy efficient, more sustainable buildings, each of which is uniquely suited to its particular spot on this planet.

The Psychrometric Chart shown to the left is one of the more advanced features available in Climate Consultant. Each dot on the chart represents the temperature and humidity of each of the 8760 hours per year. Different Design Strategies are represented by specific zones on this chart. The percentage of hours that fall into each of the 16 different Design Strategy Zones gives a relative idea of the most effective passive heating or passive cooling strategies. Climate Consultant analyzes the distribution of this psychrometric data in each Design Strategy zone in order to create a unique list of Design Guidelines for a particular location.

If you wish to work with the full desktop or laptop version of Climate Consultant, select the appropriate installation version on the download page:

Climate Consultant Download Page

Climate Consultant Overview Tutorial (~10 min.) authored by Carmen Trudell
Climate Consultant Advanced Tutorial (~12 min.) authored by Carmen Trudell

The Psychrometric Chart Tutorial is a dynamic graphic and audio presentation that shows the relationship between air temperature and humidity, and how this influences human thermal comfort.

Psychrometric Chart Tutorial (~4 min.) authored by Yasmin Bhattacharya

Climate Data for HEED, SBEED, Climate Consultant, and Opaque is available for thousands of locations around the world on the EnergyPlus web site, and can be downloaded automatically from within the program by clicking on the File Icon or the Library icon or the Project icon. (See READ-EPW (Automatic) for installation instructions.)

Additional Climate Data files for HEED, SBEED, Climate Consultant, and Opaque can also be manually downloaded in EPW format from these other web sites (see READ-EPW (Manually) for installation instructions):

• climate.onebuilding.org offers over 10,000 free EPW stations.
• weather.whiteboxtechnologies.com lists over 10,000 files.

The users manual and data format information for EPW weather data files can be downloaded for the Energy Plus web site under the View Format Definition tab.

Calculates U-value, Time Lag, and Decrement Factor for wall or roof opaque surfaces composed of a single or multiple layers. These can be used to calculate the Heat Gain or Loss through the surface. Composite surfaces are constructed by the user from a library of materials and displayed in two or three dimensions. In addition, 2-D plots of Outdoor and Sol-Air Temperatures, Radiation variables, and Heat Gain/Loss through the envelope can be displayed. A unique new feature of OPAQUE allows the inclusion of microencapsolated Phase Change Material (PCM) in one of the layers of the composite surface and uses an efficient approximation algorithm to calculate average daily Energy Reduction when PCM is included.

OPAQUE 3.0 Download Page

CAUTION: Treat this version of SOLAR2 as a DEMO only because the New Installer created December 2016 seems to be unable to accept new design data input. We are working to correct it and will post a revision as soon as possible (generation 4 released July, 1999, original release Sept., 1987) [over 10,000 downloads since Feb., 1999]

Plots sunlight penetrating through a window with any combination of rectangular fins and overhangs. Also plots hour-by-hour 3-D suns-eye view movie of the building wall. Prints annual tables of percent of window in full sun, radiation on glass, etc. NOTE: Many of its functions have also been added to HEED, SBEED, and Climate Consultant.

Solar2 Download Page

This course contains class materials for a college level architecture course in Building Climatology taught at UCLA that uses the various Energy Design Tools listed above. It also contains ten Problem Sets that taken together help the student learn the principles of how to design s small energy efficient envelope dominated building in any climate.

Fires (HTML)
Fires (PDF)

These two books are now out of print. They were written 40 years ago but the issues are still relevant today, although some of the technology is out of date. They were written with the support of the California Water Resources Center. The Regents of the University of California hold the Copyright. (Caution: if you print any pages be sure to set your printer for LANDSCAPE format.)