- HEED: Home Energy Efficient Design
- This new easy-to-use version shows you how much energy and money and carbon you can save by making various Design or Remodeling changes to your home. You can easily draw in the floor plan of your house, then click and drag windows to their correct 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, and 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 is displayed including bar charts that show how close your building is to Zero Net Energy. HEED self-installs on non-networked Windows XP or Mac OS X 10.6 or newer systems. HEED is also available in Spanish.
- Go To HEED Page
- CLIMATE CONSULTANT
- 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 below:
- Download Climate Consultant 5.4 [For Windows] (33 MB) (B5, March 11, 2013)
- Download Climate Consultant 5.4 [For Mac] (13 MB) (B5, March 11, 2013) Requires Mac OS X 10.6.8 or newer.
- Climate Consultant 5.4 is the full release with the most up-to-date graphics for newer operating systems. If you have problems displaying the 3D Charts screens you should download and install Climate Consultant 5.3 instead.
- Download Climate Consultant 5.3 [For Windows] (29 MB) (B5, October 7, 2012)
- CLIMATE CONSULTANT Lite (CCLite)
- CCLite is a web version of Climate Consultant offering most of the functionality available in the full download version of Climate Consultant although it will only access EPW data for the 16 California Climate zones. It also does not allow project data to be saved for future retrieval or the display of the 3D plots.
- GO TO CCLite Page.
- PSYCHROMETRIC CHART TUTORIAL
- 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. It is written in Flash and you can download a copy below. If you do not already have it you will also need to download the free Flash Player from the link below.
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PsyChartTutorial [Released September 15, 2008]
(After downloading the PsyChart.zip file, open the file and then open the PsyChart.html file.)
- Download the Flash Player at www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/
- CLIMATE DATA
- Climate Data for HEED and Climate Consultant is available for thousands of locations around the world on the EnergyPlus web site. (See READ-EPW (Automatic) or READ-EPW (Manually) for details.) The users manual and data format information for EPW weather data files can be downloaded from the EnergyPlus web site under the View Format Definition tab.
- OLDER TMY FORMAT CLIMATE DATA
- HEED and Climate Consultant no longer use the TMY format climate data, however some of our older design tools do, so we have written an Excel spread sheet that will convert EPW format data into our short form .TM2:
- Download EPW conversion routine (epw2tmy.xcl)
- The large TMY2 files also need to be converted to the compact version used by our older programs. To convert these files, run them through a program we have developed for either Dos or Windows:
- Download the compressed Dos Version (tm2s5dos)
- Download the compressed Windows Version (tm2s5win)
- Read the Users Manual - instructions for downloading a TMY2 data file and for running it through the Windows versions of the conversion.
- OPAQUE (generation 4 released Dec., 1999 [originally released July, 1989]) [over 8,064 downloads since Feb., 1999]
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Draws a detail of wall or roof sections, calculates
U-value, Time Lag, and Decrement Factor. It plots
temperature drop through the section. Draws 2-D daily and
3-D annual plots of Outdoor and Sol-Air Temperatures,
Normal and Total Surface Radiation, and Heat Flow through
the envelope. It was originally called SOLAR-3.
Unzip the download and install OPAQUE by clicking on SETUP.EXE, and to see the Users Manual open Manual.txt - Download OPAQUE (812KB)
- SOLAR-2 (generation 4 released July, 1999, original release Sept., 1987) [over 9,668 downloads since Feb., 1999]
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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. Prints annual tables of percent of window in full
sun, radiation on glass, etc.
- Download SOLAR-2 (Windows 95 Version [July, 1999]).
- Download SOLAR-2 (DOS Version).
- A Course in CLIMATE RESPONSIVE BUILDING DESIGN
- This 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.
ENERGY DESIGN TOOLS USERS MANUALS BIBLIOGRAPHY
- DESIGN TO SURVIVE WILDFIRES
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Fires (View as HTML)
Fires (View as PDF)