HEED: Home Energy Efficient Design

Please note that our email address has changed. Our new address is energy.design.tools@ucla.edu.

See how much energy and money you can save by making various design or remodeling changes to your home with this new easy-to-use program. You can draw in the floor plan of your own house, then click and drag your windows to their correct location. You can select from lists of typical wall and roof construction. For advanced users there are more detailed design data input options and output display graphics from the original Solar-5. HEED self installs as a stand alone program on everything from Windows 98 to Windows XP and Macintosh OS X 10.4 or later. HEED also runs in Spanish (see HEED en Espanol icon).

April 30, 2009: We have now posted the new version of HEED Build 39. It has been compiled for 32-bit machines which we hope will solve most Windows Vista problems. If you are using Vista and are having problems, it may help if you install HEED as Administrator (go to Settings, Control Panel, Users). If you get an OpenGL warning or strange graphics behavior be sure you have installed the latest version of your graphics driver and that you have the current Windows Service Pack installed. If you are running behind a firewall or on a network, see your systems administrator. Be sure to follow the default procedure which installs HEED at the top level, and do not use folder names longer that 8 characters. This new version also picks up a few minor computational errors.

If you already have HEED running, you can install this new version in the same folder, and all your data will be preserved. Just hit Recalculate for each scheme to update it
GO TO HEED DOWNLOAD PAGE

HEED software is available free. Watch the release date because we will be periodically posting new versions with added features. Please leave your email address so we can notify you of major updates.

EPW EnergyPlus Weather Data: You can download climate data for over one thousand locations around the world at the EnergyPlus web site. (See READ-USA for details.)

View HEED Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Download Tutorial PowerPoint Slides(1.3 MB. Microsoft PowerPoint file) (Updated July 2007)

Download ASES 2008 Workshop Presentation: Designing High Performance Sustainable Buildings (3 MB. PPT file)

Download How to Design High Performance Homes, including How to Change Climate Data (300 KB. PDF file)

Download Report: HEED Validated using the ASHRAE/BESTTEST Standard (99 KB. PDF file)

Download Report: HEED Validated Using HERS BESTEST, Tier 1 and 2: 2008 (84 KB. PDF file)

Download HEED User Survey: March 2002

Download HEED User Survey: May 2006

Download Instructions on Copying Schemes or Projects (Revised: January 10, 2009)

Download Instructions on How to Assemble Multiple Schemes from Different PCs (3 page pdf)

Our full set of Energy Design Tools is available on: http://www.energy-design-tools.aud.ucla.edu