Energy Design Tools

HEED: Home Energy Efficient Design: 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-USA 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. A Macintosh OS X version is also available. HEED is also available in Spanish.; Go To HEED Page
SOLAR-5.7 (Now replaced by HEED) (generation 8 released June, 2000 [developed initially in 1976]) [over 10,273 downloads since June, 2000]: 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.; Also included is RATES, a utility that contains over 170 residential and commercial electric rates. It lets SOLAR-5 show ratepayers a detailed picture of their energy costs. A manual for RATES is included in WordPerfect format.; Also included is S5SS, the SOLAR-5 Spread Sheet, that formats data recorded in an actual building or in a laboratory experiment.; Downloads no longer available. Solar5 is now contained in HEED.
CLIMATE CONSULTANT 4 [Updated November 8, 2008]: This Version 4.0 adds a number of new features to those in the prior version of Climate Consultant 3 including new graphic screens such as a Monthly Diurnal Averages plot. It now 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. 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. Climate data is available for over two thousand locations from the EnergyPlus web site. A new 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 4 [For Windows](18 MB); Download Climate Consultant 4 [For Mac OS X](8 MB); Vista users sometimes have installation problems. In the current version, the C:\Program Files has a stringent security mechanism that has resulted in many complaints. Users cannot explicitly create files in this directory hierarchy. Vista 7 may allow users to lower this level of security. Here is a workaround. When you install the program, explicitly change the target directory to C:\CC4 in order to bypass the C:\Program Files security restriction then the installation should finish without error. Please let us know if you still have problems.
PSYCHROMETRIC CHART TUTORIAL [UPDATED - September 18, 2008]: 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 CONSULTANT 3 [Replaced by Climate Consultant 4]: This original version of Climate Consultant is written in Java and runs on both Windows and Mac OS X computers. It graphically displays climate data in either metric or imperial units in dozens of ways useful to architects including monthly bar charts, timetable charts, and psychrometric charts, sun shading charts, and sun dial charts. New 3-D plots show temperatures, humidity, radiation, and sky cover. The new “Wind Wheel” graphics shows velocity and direction correlated with temperature and humidity, and can be animated hourly or daily or monthly. The psychrometric analysis recommends the most appropriate passive design strategies as outlined in Givoni’s Man Climate and Architecture. It develops the kind of data incorporated in Watson and Labs Climatic Building Design. Climate data is available for over a thousand locations from the EnergyPlus web site.; Download Climate Consultant 3 [For Windows](12.5 MB) [Updated August 9, 2007]; Download Climate Consultant 3 [For Mac OS X](2.6 MB) [Updated August 9, 2007]
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-USA 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]: 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]: 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)

ENERGY DESIGN TOOLS: