- HEED: Home Energy Efficient Design [HEED 4 (Build 5) July 26, 2010]
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This new easy-to-use program shows you how much energy and money you can save by making various Design or Remodeling changes to your home. You can easily draw in the floorplan of your own house, then click and drag your windows to their correct location. You can select from lists of standard wall and roof construction. This version adds a number of new features including allowing changes to electric and gas utility rates, adding rates for oil and propane, allowing pollution data to be revised, allowing attic radiant barriers to be added or removed, offering operable shading, improving the thermal mass algorithm (admittance factor), and solving a problem with windows. Climate data is available for over one thousand locations around the world. (See READ-EPW for details.) For Advanced Users there are more detailed design data input options and output display graphics from the original SOLAR-5. HEED self-installs on stand alone non-networked Windows 95 and higher operating systems and on Macintosh OS X. HEED is also available in Spanish. See the HEED page for more details.
- Go To HEED Page
- SOLAR-5.7 (Now replaced by HEED) (generation 8 released June, 2000 [developed initially in 1976]) [over 10,273 downloads 2000 to 2005]
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Displays 3-D plots of hourly energy performance for the whole building or for any of 16 different components. It also plots heat flow into/out of thermal mass, and indoor air temperature, output of the HVAC system, cost of electricity and heating fuel, and the corresponding amount of air pollution. It uses hour-by-hour weather data, and can call RATES in the background to calculate detailed electricity costs. It has many special commands like overlay, post-it, and compare. It also includes for California’s major electric and gas utilities which shows ratepayers a detailed picture of their energy costs. A manual for RATES is included in WordPerfect format.
- Downloads no longer available. Solar5 is now contained in HEED.
- CLIMATE CONSULTANT 5 [July 26, 2010]
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This Version 5.0 adds a number of new features to those in the prior version of Climate Consultant 4 including three additional Comfort Models: ASHARE Handbook 2005, ASHRAE Standard 55, and Adaptive Comfort. It now comes with climate data for all of California’s 16 climate zones, but climate data is also available for over two thousand locations from the EnergyPlus web site. (See READ-EPW for details.) A web-based dynamic graphic tutorial explaining the Psychrometric Chart and how it applies to human thermal comfort and to HVAC systems design is also available on this web site.
- Download Climate Consultant 5 [For Windows](32 MB)
- Download Climate Consultant 5 [For Mac](9 MB)
- This Version uses all the features from prior versions of Climate Consultant including new graphic screens such as a Monthly Diurnal Averages plot. It calculates a set of the top 20 Design Guidelines based on your unique climate and the passive design strategies you selected on the Psychrometric Chart. Each Guideline has a sketch illustrating how it applies when you click on the guideline number. The Guidelines and their accompanying sketches were based in part on Watson and Labs Climatic Building Design, and on Loftness,.et.al, Regional Guidelines for Building Passive Energy Conserving Homes.
- Vista and Windows 7 users have been able to install and run it successfully if they are the designated administrator and are not on a network or behind a firewall. Vista installation problems may be solved if users lower their level of security. Here is a workaround. When you install the program, explicitly change the target directory to C:\CC5 in order to bypass the C:\Program Files security restriction, then the installation should finish without error. Please let us know if you have questions.
- PSYCHROMETRIC CHART TUTORIAL [UPDATED - September 18, 2008]
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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.
- 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 over one thousand locations around the world on the EnergyPlus web site. (See READ-EPW for details.)
- HEED and Climate Consultant no longer use TMY format data. We have written a conversion Excel spread sheet that will convert these large files in .epw format to the short form .tm2 used in our older programs which can be downloaded by clicking the link below:
- Download EPW conversion routine (epw2tmy.xcl)
- You can convert any of the 239 TMY2 (Typical Meterological Year 2) data files into a format that will run on our older programs. These sites include cities in all 50 states in the U.S. and some of territories were developed at the Natural Renewable Energy Laboratory.
- The users manual and any of the weather data files can be downloaded from:
- http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old_data/nsrdb/tmy2/
- Note: These large TMY2 files 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.
- 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).
- 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)
