Is it practical to use open studio to model basic house upgrades?

I am working on a project with 85 basic family homes. Is open studio a practical tool to model building upgrades? The homes have the following caricaturists at present: 1. 4 bedrooms, 1 living room 136m^2 2. Using extreme amounts of electricity for heating (10kW average) 3. Located in a very cold climate is south america 4. I want to swap out electric heating with solar thermal (can I model this?) 5. Is there a house template available for "building type"

EnerTek Global

asked 2014-10-28 17:08:37 -0500

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Neal Kruis

updated 2014-10-28 19:13:01 -0500

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Are you planning to run one representative model or 85 separate models? OpenStudio doesn't have a residential building type template...yet.

If you haven't already you may want to take a look at BEopt which also runs EnergyPlus and offers a quick and easy way to generate an IDF as well as easy to use parametric and optimization options for residential buildings.

Currently OpenStudio does not model solar thermal although there is a measure for solar electric. BEopt can model both solar thermal and PV. In either case you should be able to alter the resulting IDF for your purposes.

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MatthewSteen

answered 2014-10-28 17:24:41 -0500, updated 2014-11-11 11:43:23 -0500

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Matt, Thank you very much for your response. I am planning to experiment with upgrades in one representative model. All homes are almost the same. I am carrying out a co-heating experiment in one house to collect actual data, I want to tune my model to act like the actual house, and then apply various changes such as insulation upgrades, new windows etc. My goal is to demonstrate the value of various upgrades to my client.

I am going to check out the BEopt link.

EnerTek Global (2014-10-28 21:47:02 -0500) edit

Note that BEopt (using EnergyPlus) can model Solar Water Heating, but not Solar Thermal for space heating.

Eric Wilson (2014-11-11 10:01:42 -0500) edit

Thanks for catching my oversight @Eric Wilson, I've updated my answer.

MatthewSteen (2014-11-11 11:44:43 -0500) edit

There is a fairly large collection of residential measures in our measure development repository. These will make their way to the BCL when we've had more time to test them. In the interim, you can drop a note at the openstudio email address requesting access to the repo if you want to play with them.