Below is the text version of the webinar, "Building America Research Tools: Field Test Best Practices, BEopt, and the National Residential Efficiency Measures Database," presented March 18, 2015.

Speakers:

Lieko Earle, senior engineer, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Bethany Sparn, senior engineer, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Scott Horowitz, senior engineer, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Noel Merket, engineer, National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Gail:

Hello everyone! I am Gail Werren with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and I’d like to welcome you to today’s webinar hosted by the Building America program. We are excited to have Lieko Earle, Bethany Sparn, Scott Horowitz, and Noel Merket here today to talk about Building America Research Tools, specifically the Field Test Best Practices website, the Building Energy Optimization (or BEopt) software, and the National Residential Efficiency Measures Database.

Before we begin, I’ll quickly go over some of the webinar features. For audio, you have two options. You may either listen through your computer or telephone. If you choose to listen through your computer, please select the “mic and speakers” option in the audio pane. By doing so, we will eliminate the possibility of feedback and echo.

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If you are having difficulty viewing the materials through the webinar portal, you may find PDF copies of the presentations at the website listed here and you may follow along as our speakers present. Today’s webinar is being recorded and the recording will be available on the DOE YouTube channel within a few weeks. We have an exciting program prepared for you today that will focus on Building America research tools that support best practices in the building science community. Before our speakers begin, I will provide a short overview of the Building America program. Following the presentations, we will have a Question and Answer session, closing remarks, and a brief survey.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Building America program has been a source of innovations in residential building energy performance, durability, quality, affordability, and comfort for 20 years. This world-class research program partners with industry to bring cutting-edge innovations and resources to market.

Building America is supported by 10 industry research teams and four national labs. Each of these teams and labs partner with dozens of industry professionals including builders, remodelers, manufacturers, and utilities. The best and the brightest in the residential buildings industry can be found here.

Building America uses applied research to deliver building science solutions, using a four-step framework. These innovative solutions are tested in homes to develop proven case studies of success the market can point to. Building America provides the tools the building industry needs to ensure the innovations are applied correctly, always keeping an eye on energy performance, durability, quality, and affordability. The final step, infrastructure development, is the conduit to getting innovations to the marketplace.

Building America research focuses on how the components of new and existing homes work together through systems integration. As the market changes and evolves, so has the direction of our research in order to add value and drive changes in performance across the home building industry. In addition to technical challenges we have been addressing for decades, there is now a need to understand market transformation issues, such as valuation of energy efficiency.

In the 20 years of Building America research, we have spearheaded combining ultra-high efficiency with high performance in both new and existing homes. And we are consistently achieving this challenging task.

For example, in 1995, a typical home used three times more energy per square foot compared to today, and indoor air quality, comfort, and durability problems were common. Today, a home built to DOE Zero Energy Ready Home specifications uses less than half the energy and is more comfortable, healthy, and durable. By 2030, Building America will demonstrate that new and existing homes can produce more energy than they use.

Do you want to know more about these proven innovations? The Building America Solution Center is your one-stop source for expert information on hundreds of high-performance construction topics, including air sealing and insulation, HVAC components, windows, indoor air quality, and much more. You can find it by the URL on your screen or by searching on ‘Building America Solution Center.’ Also, the Building America website provides information about the program, the latest Top Innovations and case studies, and there, you can also subscribe to the monthly newsletter. And now, onto today’s presentation!

Our webinar today will discuss Building America Research Tools, specifically the Field Test Best Practices website, BEopt, and the National Residential Efficiency Measures database. If you would like information about any of these efforts, or if you are interested in collaborating, please feel free to contact any of our presenters.

Our first speakers today are Lieko Earle and Bethany Sparn from NREL. Lieko leads the field testing efforts for the Building America program. She focuses on field instrumentation and experiment design to evaluate emerging energy-efficient technologies, lab studies of sensors and controls for grid-connected buildings, home energy management tools, and field test methods for residential retrofits and new construction.

Bethany’s research concentrates on residential HVAC equipment, heat pump water heaters, non-intrusive load monitoring equipment, home energy management devices, and whole-house performance field testing. Next up are Scott Horowitz and Noel Merket, who will present information about the Building Energy Optimization software or BEopt. Scott leads NREL’s Residential Building team’s analysis area, which includes building energy modeling, optimization, accuracy, and technology pathways. He is also the lead developer of BEopt to support Building America researchers and energy efficiency goals. Noel’s work at NREL focuses on the National Residential Efficiency Measures database, Field Data Repository, and BEopt software development.

With that, I’d like to welcome Lieko and Bethany to start the presentation.

Lieko:

OK, so here's a brief outline of our presentation. I have a couple of slides first on the project motivation -- why we embarked on this multi-year effort. Then I'll give a general overview of the website and describe the types of information that you'll find on it. Then for the second half of the presentation Bethany will give a live demo on how you can contribute your particular area of expertise to this project. She'll show you how to get a user account and edit or create new content for the site.

Here's the short story of why we created this web tool. Over the years as we've worked with other labs and MBA teams ... sorry, forgot to advance the slide, also, I have to ask, can you see? No, I can't get rid of this thing. OK, sorry. Technical difficulties.

So here's the short story of why we created this web tool. Over the years as we've worked with other laboratories and MBA teams we've realized that there are key gaps in our field test support efforts. First, it was apparent that we needed to do a better job of covering the basics. The success of a field monitoring or experiment project depends in large part on how well you plan it to begin with. There are some essential components to any good field test plan, like articulating good research questions or assessing the current state of knowledge and doing a preliminary simulation study so that you have some idea of what you're expecting to see that are really important. We realized that we needed to collect concrete examples of well written plans, cleverly designed experiments, and well documented conclusions so that they could be a resource to people planning new experiments.

A second thing is that there were a number of us on the residential team here at NREL that started around the same time, about five years ago, and we quickly became involved in several field tests. Many of us had backgrounds in research but were new to residential buildings so this was a great way to learn a lot very quickly. That's when it hit us how difficult it was to hunt down specific guidelines on field test methods. A lot of field testing is kind of like folklore. There are tips and tricks that you just don't know unless you've done it or talked to someone else who has done it. So collectively there is so much practical knowledge that the Building America community has accumulated over the years but it's all spread around between various technical reports and emails and in many cases just in individual brains scattered around the country. So we realized there is a need for a central repository for all this information.

Third, we all have different aspects of field testing that we're good at and we have a tendency to focus on things that we're good at but a rigorous whole home field test requires a bigger picture. We need to maximize the amount of useful information that can come out of every field test opportunity. This can only be done if the resources are available to help you step through your entire plan in advance, think through every experiment and analysis carefully, anticipate all of the problems and make sure you're not missing any key pieces of information that you'll later need in order to make meaningful conclusions.

So to address these needs we created, or I should say we are creating because this is a continually evolving process, a new web resource that would be call Field Test Best Practices. The goals are to organize and make publicly available all this information, to use a dynamic medium -- this is why we chose a web format rather than paper -- so that it can be continually revised and added to. We're essentially crowd-sourcing the documentation so that anyone who has a log-in account can edit or add new content. Our primary audience is the Building America community, but that simply gave us a place to start. We envision that this site will serve and be served by a much broader community of building scientists moving forward.

So, what does this site look like? Here is a picture of the home page. There is a rotating slide show featuring a few topics and then we've organized some landing pages to facilitate searching for content from three different perspectives: Field Test start to finish, Building Components and Systems, and Measurement and Instrumentation. I'll talk about these three landing pages on the next slide. Then there is a search bar in the top right corner, which is probably, in most cases the easiest way to get to a specific piece of content.

The content on this website is organized in a unique way so that each piece of information lives by itself and not buried in a directory kind of structure. In other words, the page containing information, for example on blower door testing, doesn't live inside the infiltration section. There are separate pages for infiltration and blower door testing and they're linked so you can get from one to the other. As I've mentioned, we've organized the content in a way that allows users to search for it from three different kinds of perspectives. Field test start to finish gives a list of topics that are centered around general guidance on field test planning and execution. The building components and systems landing page will be useful if you are looking for information on how to test specific appliances or building systems. For example, if you are looking for the heat transfer through a foundation or the installed energy performance of a central air conditioning system, the measurement and instrumentation section lists the types of measurements that you might need to make for your field experiment, for example, how to measure electrical energy or how to measure different kinds of temperatures.

The three landing pages are designed to help you find what you need quickly. For example, you might be looking for information on thermocouples but if you're doing a field test on a water heater you might get to this information starting on the building components systems landing page and following the links from the domestic hot water page to the appropriate temperature sensors or you could start in the measurement and instrumentation section and click on the temperature page to find the appropriate sections. Either way, you'll end up on the same piece of content.

Here are just a few sample screenshots to give you an idea of the level of information that you'll find. On the left hand side you'll see an introductory page on thermocouples and then linked below are separate pages pointing to different thermocouples for different applications. The orange arrows on those topics that point to the right indicate that these are links to separate pages on each of these topics. What you see here are only the introductory paragraphs for those other sections but if you follow those links you'll get the separate pages -- a whole page on immersion thermocouples, a whole page on surface-mount thermocouples, and a whole page on bare thermocouples.

The same thing on the right hand side. There is an introductory page on electrical energy with some basic information and then several separate pages that discuss various aspects and hardware used in measuring electrical energy.

The site is flexible enough to accommodate more than just text. You can put tables in, diagrams, and photos. Here are some examples. There is a table showing the different kinds of flow meters and estimated installation costs. On the bottom there is a photo of a CT installed correctly with labels indicating how you would position it so that the source and the load side of the CT are pointing the right way. In the bottom right there is a diagram of the best methods for positioning emerging thermocouples. The site features lots of specific guidance and diagrams on how to install things.

The site is open and free for the public to use. So anyone can view the site and search for content, but in order to contribute new content or edit existing content or participate in the user forums you'll need to register on the site and receive a login account. One thing I want to be clear about is that this platform was sort of inspired by the likes of Wikipedia and created with the vision of crowdsourcing practical field test knowledge. We've done our best to populate the site with content around what we see as the most common needs but we certainly don't have all of the answers in house and it's a pretty vast array of knowledge that we're looking to document, not to mention that methods and equipment are evolving all the time. The more people use it and contribute to it, the more useful it will become. We invite you all to lend us your expertise. Most of what is currently on the site was written by staff at NREL and also a fair amount of contributions we've received from the Energy Center of Wisconsin.

Finally, I want to introduce a new feature on the website, which was actually technically launched several months ago but we held off on announcing it because there were some bugs with the functionality that we wanted to resolve before we had visitors. We have a brand new facilitated forum, or informal exchange of ideas, among the user community. The point is to let users have casual conversations about direct experiences including, for example, pros and cons of rare software products and ask other users for input on particular problems that may be circumstance specific and not the kind of thing that you want to create a general purpose content page for. It will be facilitated by NREL staff so that questions don't end up in a black hole and so that we can make sure that nobody posts anything offensive. Now, Bethany will give a short demo of the site.

Bethany:

OK, so here we are on the main page again. This should look familiar. We have the rotating slide show that Lieko mentioned and then there are the landing pages for the three different topic areas: field test start to finish, building components and systems, and measurement and instrumentation. They are listed on the front with abbreviated topics and then they are also available along this top bar so that you can access them from any page.

Field test: Start to Finish, as we mentioned, is sort of a big picture overview of things like experimental design, field test considerations, data analysis and reporting are discussed here. You'll notice in the outline here that some pages have links and some do not. We are constantly working on new content and definitely looking to you for your help.

Building Components and Systems, again as Lieko mentioned, is more focused on different parts of a building, appliances and equipment that you might find and want to do sort of targeted field tests looking at different systems. We have them broken out by different groups, things like envelope, HVAC, hot water, and then different sort of more specific components listed under each topic. Measurement and Instrumentation is more focused on the different sensors and measurement techniques that you might need during your test.

You can get at things in a lot of different ways. Let's say you are interested in liquid flow. You want to measure water flowing out of a water heater so you might start on measurement and instrumentation and come over here to the liquid flow page. Here we have a general page talking about why you might want to measure liquid, usually water, things you might consider like cost and labor to install, and then down below we have links to and summaries of a number of different types of flow meters found on the site. There's just a short introductory paragraph showing and you can click on the page you're interested in to find out more detail. This is a turbine flow meter page. It has a picture and some more information and that might be how you ended up here.

Alternatively, if you were doing a field test of a water heater, say, you might start under building components and systems and go to the electric water heater link. Again, here we have some generic information on electric water heaters and a couple different types. Let's say you are interested in a heat pump water heater and you can scroll down and see some recommended instrumentation, including water flow rates, which again takes you to the turbine flow meter page. So that's just a little bit of a demonstration of how you might end up browsing information.

Alternatively, you could use the search bar, which is available from any page on the website. Let's say I'm interested in temperature. I can use the search bar to search temperature and I get a number of different pages dealing with temperature measurement, all sorts of different temperature sensors. Here is another way of getting at information depending on how you like to browse or search. Let's say you've been looking around the website and I absolutely encourage you guys to go poke around and see what's here and what we might be missing.

Once you find something that you're interested in, or feel like we need a little bit more information to help beef up the topic, you might want to get yourself a login. Go back to the main home page here and you'll see the login button on the top right side. You'll want to select the tab for "create new account." Here you'll enter information for user name, email address, name, and organization. This will help us to just understand who is using the site and also make sure you're not robots. Once you submit all of your information, site managers, which include Lieko and I, will go through and grant accounts to all the non-robots out there and this account will give you access to edit and create new content for the main site and also will allow you to participate in the forum. Just like the rest of the site, you can view the forum without login but you will need to have an account to actually participate.

I'm going to log in so that we can look at a couple of different features for the creating and editing content. When you first log in there is a little wrench in the upper left corner and that will give you this side bar with a lot of tools. I will also mention that I'm going to point you to a user guide that includes this and many more details on how to use the logged in features of the website. Don't feel like you need to be taking notes or anything.

Once you are in, you're logged in, you're ready to go, and one of the tools in this black top tool bar that I really like is this content lookup. This is a list of all of the different pages on the website in alphabetical order. So, you can browse through there to find the topic you are looking for to get you started.

I'm just going to show you quickly what it might look like to edit an existing page. Here we have a page on condensing gas water heaters. If you go to the tab that says edit draft, this page already has an existing draft so we're just going to look at that. We have the title up here, we have a summary, and that is that short paragraph that is getting pulled into other pages and it's usually just the first paragraph of the body. Then in the body of the page, this is going to look like a pretty typical editing screen. It's a WYSIWYG so what you see is what you get for the most part I would say. Some pretty common formatting tools along the top - bold and italics, bulleted list, numbered lists, subscripts, superscripts, that sort of thing. We can link to different pages on the website or exterior to the website. We can bring in photos. We can create tables and do different formatting. I'll sort of just scroll through here. Here we have some links to other pages on the site and we also have the ability to add equations using a standard LaTeX editor. So, a lot of different tools out there that are all contained in this user guide I'm going to point you to in a minute. Once you're done you scroll down to the bottom of the page and hit "save" and you'll see that the screen will now show the same page with a red border and it says draft. This will just clearly delineate which page is the draft and which is published. You're welcome to keep working on a draft for as long as you like and then whenever you're ready for it to be sort of pushed forward there's this drop down menu at the top that gives you the option to push it into technical review. Once you're ready for that stage you can just hit apply and technical editors, Lieko and I are two of them, will take a look to make sure the content is accurate, and relevant, and then we're going to push it to editorial review to make sure that all of the communications standards at NREL are met. Then it will get published. Another thing that I'll mention is that when we are creating new content we really like to make sure that its link to other places so that it gets found by everybody. So, when we put two pages in here we'll make sure that we get it linked in a couple different places so that it can kind of live in this sort of dynamic space.

Then similarly I'll show you quickly how to create a content, a new content, page. Also on this last bar there's a button for add content and you're going to add a page. We have a title bar and the body and you'll notice that when you start typing "pressure" into the title bar it's going to start giving you pages with similar words in the title. This is just to help us make sure we're not duplicating information. If I think that we're missing something and I want to create a page on pressure, but there's all these other different pages about something to do with pressure, I might investigate whether what I was planning on writing is contained somewhere else. If you don't think those other pages are complete, we recommend that you edit those and add to them rather than create a new page and duplicate information out there.

In the body section it's going to look similar. You're going to have all the same formatting and editing tools and you'll go down and save when you're ready.

I'm going to quickly show you where that how-to guide is if I can get out of this page. I'm going to go to the about screen, the "about" tab, which is available from any place you are on the website. This is a little bit about the website and then towards the bottom I have mentioned that if you want to create new content or edit content we have a "Field Test Best Practices" user guide. This is a pretty detailed document with lots of pictures and lots of steps to help you navigate through the system of creating and editing content. We are also always available via email if you need additional help, but hopefully that will get you started in the right direction.

The last thing that I want to quickly show you is the forum. The forum, again, you can find on that main top bar from anywhere. This forum we've already sort of populated with a couple of folders. They match the three different topic areas: building systems and components, field test: start to finish, and measurement and instrumentation. You can pick one that you think best matches your question. Come in here and create a topic. I just put in the little welcome message to show you what it looks like. First, little message and then we have a familiar looking comment area. You can type in text. You can add pictures. You can excel files. Whatever you think you might need to add to help describe your problem or question to the group. We at NREL will be monitoring this to keep the discussion going but we just want to encourage all of you to check out the forum and help the community with their questions.

That is your introduction to the Field Test Best Practices website and I do hope you all will come and take a look. I am all done and ready for Scott.

Scott:

OK, thanks, Bethany. My name is Scott Horowitz. As Gail mentioned, I'm the lead developer at BEopt and I'm going to give a bit of a highlight overview over the key abilities of the BEopt, a little bit of history in terms of where it came from, and roll out some of the unique features of BEopt relative to a lot of other tools out there and explain how BEopt came to be an important piece of the Building America program.

So, what is BEopt? BEopt is a software program that you can download. You can install it on your own computer, run it from your computer. We sometimes refer to it as plug-and-play software, which is to say that BEopt itself is really just an interface and it interfaces with existing simulation engines. There are existing engines, like EnergyPlus and DOE2. EnergyPlus is sort of considered the main simulation engine that BEopt uses. It's supported by DOE. It's their flagship whole building simulation engine. It does hour by hour and even sub hourly time step calculations using detailed physics and it's considered at a very accurate and robust simulation engine. There're a lot of software tools on the market that some of those will use, for example, DOE2. There are other types of engines, sometimes seasonal calculations and so on, but we really are trying to push EnergyPlus as a more accurate representation of the energy modeling in the building.

BEopt is an interface. The user will describe a building or a series of buildings in BEopt. BEopt will pass information to the simulation engine. In terms of input files, it describes heating, cooling, lighting, solar, the whole building. It's a simulation engine, as I said. Based on the weather file that you chose, it will come up with your energy use as well as your utility bill and that information will come back to BEopt and when BEopt is running in optimization mode it will use that information to then say, alright, from all these different building components that you wanted to evaluate this is an optimal building in terms of cost and energy savings. It will say, based on that let's go ahead and get some additional components. It will step through trying to identify optimal building designs all the way to zero net energy. I'll go through that in a little more detail ahead. These are the options. I'm not going to go through all of them but I will mention that BEopt does work for both new construction and existing building retrofits. The tool out there right now on the website is freely available for download targets single family homes. It has some simplified capabilities for doing attached walls but we're actually planning to do a big release to BEopt soon with much more sophisticated multifamily capabilities. Then there's a lot more capabilities, as I said, in terms of cost, drawing of your building, utility rates, etc.

In terms of history of BEopt, it really started almost 15 years ago as a research tool in the Building America program where we're trying to understand. First, I guess, 15 years ago zero net energy buildings were not a common concept like they are today. A lot has obviously changed in the last 15 years. There's a lot of forward looking people saying we know we have this goal of zero net energy and we know how to get small energy savings but we really don't know what it looks like to cost-effectively get all the way to zero net energy. How much PV do you put in versus efficiency? What specific components should I put in? Even if I know what components can get me to zero net energy, are they cost-effective technologies? We want to be able to look for where there are gaps in certain areas. Is it more difficult to reduce the space conditioning? For the Building America program it may tend to do more investment in certain technologies related to that. That was really the goal of BEopt to try to optimize the sense of building components on the market to understand how far we are from zero net energy, what gaps are there, and what still needs to be done. Eventually BEopt came to be officially released to the public in 2010, coupled with the EnergyPlus simulation engine. Most recently we've taken a re-development of BEopt into what's become BEopt version 2 released, I think, in 2013. The current version of BEopt on the website then is based on BEopt version 2 and it's got a number of additional capabilities in terms of running batch simulations and simplified interface and so on.

I just want to recognize that beyond the investment that DOE has made into the tool, we have had a number of different partners over the years. Most recently we're doing some work with the California Public Utilities Commission to add multifamily capabilities to BEopt, like I mentioned. We're planning to put out a release of BEopt at the end of June. That would be our first release of BEopt that has multifamily capabilities. I'll give you a quick sneak peak at that later in the presentation. The other thing that we're doing is that we've done some work with BPA in the northwest, the Bonneville Power Administration to make further improvements to BEopt and often, in fact, the Energy Plus simulation engine in terms of the modeling that's done for some advanced technologies. These are technologies that keep hot water heaters, mini-split heat pumps, and some other areas that are fundamental for residential buildings in terms of ground heat transfer in ducts and so on. That's going to make it into future versions of BEopt and EnergyPlus in terms of a model based on that project. We're pretty excited about that because of recent activities.

Here is just a quick look I'm going to give you of the interface itself. We tried to strike a balance between keeping BEopt very simple and having a lot of flexibility for the user, lots of different questions, and be available for power users as well but it's very simple in terms of the way it's laid out. There are just three input screens and one output screen: a screen where you define your geometry, some information about your site including the location and economics and utility rates, and then a screen where you define your options or building components. You click the run button and then you get some output. The interface is quite simple and I'm just going to step through the screens to give you a quick look at what they entail. This is the geometry input screen. The way this work is that for a given level, here we are at foundation level, you would select a space and you drag your mouse and draw this rectangle here. Then you could select other spaces as well. You'll be drawing the floor plan of each level one by one. On the right hand side, while you do that, BEopt would be rendering that building giving you a full 3D geometry of that building, which is important for your simulation modeling both in terms of getting appropriate surface areas for all of your walls, knowing what surfaces are in contact with what -- that you have, for example, a wall behind this garage pop out that is between your garage and your living space and things like that. BEopt automatically does some roof generation as well. It's a very rapid tool for getting full detailed 3D building geometry into the software.

This is the same screen again. This is just a little bit of a sneak peak, actually, at our multifamily mode version of BEopt. We tried to keep it pretty similar to the single family mode. One of the main differences here is that this concept now of units is that you can have multiple units define your building. Here's an example on the second story where I've got living space for eight different units in this building and there'd be more on the first story as well. You can see that creates this very large building with different units with windows and doors and that sort of thing. This is how we anticipate BEopt being used to model an entire multifamily building. They'll be some other modifications too in terms of systems and envelopes measured and so on that you can look at in the context of multifamily buildings.

This is the first input screen -- the geometry screen. After you've done this, you've defined your geometry; you can then go to the site screen. The site screen, again, is where you can specify this is your EnergyPlus weather location. So this is a weather file that you can click this little down arrow and pick weather locations around the world. There are some economic parameters that you can specify. BEopt does do full life cycle costing. The analysis period, for example, comes into place where if you were say new construction and you're saying you're going to evaluate this highly efficient water heater, and the water heater maybe lasts 12 years, then in terms of the BEopt economic calculations you would be doing replacements of those water heaters every 12 years up until 30 years and then actually at 30 years there would be some accounting if you had extra years left on that last water heater.

Information about your mortgage -- BEopt will do financing for both new construction and for retrofit as well. You can define incentives, both for PV and for efficiency. Some information you can fill in just for notes in terms of the project that you're working on. Then at the bottom is where you define you utility rates for your building. For electricity there are simplified utility rates where you specify a user value or where you pick the state average, in this case for Georgia, or even the national average or if you were to pick detailed utility rates you could define very complex tiered kind of views with real time pricing, things like that. BEopt also does shift with the number of utility rates around the country that are based on this open utility rate database so it integrates with that database and makes those all available to the user during the dropdown list. Then on the PV side you can also specify net metering versus feed-in tariff, etc. That's the site screen dealing with economics in location and utility rates.

Then the last screen here is the option screen. On the left here is a series of building components across various categories of building. Here are a number of different wall categories. You can see unfinished attic, roof, a foundation, down below there is more in terms of equipment and appliances and lighting and so on. For any category that you've got selected there is a series of options available to you to select from. It's a very simple, quick, point and click operation in BEopt because we ship with over 1,000 options across over 100 categories. It has a wealth of building components available already. You can define your own if you don't see one in the built-in list that's made available to you and shipped with BEopt. In optimization mode where your trying to figure out what is the best theory or combination of options, this is what you would do where you could select a range of different wall constructions and BEopt would evaluate them one at a time and come back and eventually tell you which one, based on your energy savings goal, is the most appropriate one for you. Whereas, if you were just modeling just a single individual building design you'd be just selecting one building design in each of these categories. You would say this is my wood stud wall option. This is my wall sheathing option, etc.

Then, after you were to choose all of the information across those three input screens, you with click “run.” The EnergyPlus simulations would run in the background and you could get something like this. This is the output screen for a sample optimization. I'm going to talk a little bit more about how this curve comes to be. Essentially it's a curve where the y axis is energy related cost, so it's a cost metric and on the x axis is energy savings. Ideally you'd like to be as far to the right, as much energy savings as possible, and as far down as possible so the most cost savings as well. This, as I said, was an optimization. Each of these points represents a combination of different efficiency measures. From a purely economic point of view based on the building that we simulated and the components that we made available to the optimization, down here these points here would be your most economic, sort of globally economic, building designs. Generally speaking, these are efficiency designs and at some point you would start to put PV on your house when it becomes the cheaper option. Then all the results for the different simulations are saved and you can select them based on what point you have selected. Here we have a point that's at 80% energy savings. You get a breakout of the energy use in that design relative to your sort of baseline or reference design. You can see the reduction in energy consumption based on efficiency, the smaller bars here, and also this line here represents the PV reduction. Not only do we have reduced consumption in our building, in this 80% efficient building, but a lot of it is being offset with PV as well. On the right hand side is a look at the options that make up this specific building design. You can see there are descriptions over here on the right as well as some cost information so it's a very rich set of output available to the user to combine and find out exactly what building designs they're interested in and be able to explore what is most cost effective for their project.

That was a brief look at the interface. I just want to take a second now to describe this concept of optimization and BEopt, which is really one of the unique pieces of BEopt and we would argue is really important as you push out to zero net energy. As I mentioned, BEopt started 10-15 years ago and a lot has changed since then. So it's important I think to always recalibrate yourself to recent changes because three years ago, five years ago, it could take some time to figure out what you think is maybe a cost effective building design given those times, but of course PV costs have come down very quickly in recent years. Utility rates tend to trend upward. Natural gas specifically, of course, fluctuates a fair amount. Then, of course, there are always new technologies coming on the market -- heat pumps, 3 and 4 pane windows, water heaters, clothes dryers, a lot of new technologies and there will continue to be new technologies. The ability to have a tool to answer these questions on an ongoing basis, as the context changes, is a really important piece of BEopt.

This is a little theoretical diagram showing the path to zero net energy. It's all about trying to identify minimum cash flow designs at various energy savings levels up to ZNE. Here we have a theoretical diagram. On the x axis, again, we have serious energy savings and on the y axis we have energy-related cash flow. This energy-related cash flow is made up of utility bills plus mortgage costs. We're going to focus on incremental mortgage costs to cover any efficiency measures that you make in the building. We're going to start at a reference building. This might be your baseline design. At this moment our building is made up of 100% utility bills. We haven't made any improvements to it yet. Then what we'd like to do is we'd like to find building technologies that will move us to the right, that will save energy savings, and often they will come at a reduced energy related cash flow. Your utility bills for some technologies will actually be reduced more than the increment that is required to pay for them. Over 30 years, if that's your analysis period for the utility bills, you can get cost savings relative to what you have to pay for that technology and it's rolled up into your mortgage payment. Sometimes at the very beginning, in fact, there are some no-cost measures that save energy and don't even cost anything. Examples of those would be reorienting your building or shifting some of your windows from one facade to another. You can find some technologies that will reduce, that will be a net positive both in terms of energy savings and cost savings, but at some point you are going to have diminishing returns. As you continue to put in new technologies in your buildings, the incremental mortgage costs will outstrip the savings you will get in your utility bills and so this curve here will trend upward again. If you were to continue to put on higher and higher or I should say less and less cost-effective technologies, you would get something like this where the curve would go essentially vertical and you can't get any more energy savings by doing efficiencies. BEopt will always evaluate doing additional efficiency versus the cost of employing PV. It looks at the marginal cost of saved energy from efficiency relative to the marginal cost of produced energy from PV. At the point where PV is a more cost effective technology, it will put PV in your building to get you to zero net energy. When you're at that point you will, in theory, reduce your utility bill cost to zero and all of your energy savings improvements are rolled up in your mortgage. Now of course, this is theoretical. There are some things to think about in terms of net metering, you can also have limitations on how much PV you can put on your building, so there could be some cap here where you can only put on so much PV and then you might have to go back to efficiency. This is a theoretical and BEopt is not a theoretical tool.  It will handle those types of situations in its optimization search.

One thing to point out also, or maybe two things, is that the slope of this curve back when we created this theoretical path to ZNE was pretty steep because PV was pretty expensive. These days PV has come down a whole lot so we should probably update this slope here but actually you'd expect PV to be a much shallower slope and at some point if PV, the cost of PV, keeps coming down it's possible the slope could become negative, which would be really interesting.               

The other thing that's worth pointing out is that there is a big difference between being on the left side of the curve here that is our reference building, where you had 100% utility bills, and being at the right side of the curve, where you've got no utility bills and 100% mortgage costs. That is that your mortgage costs don't change over time. By locking in your energy-efficiency improvements in your building, you really heading off any possibility of future utility bill or utility rate increases over time. You're locking in your ZNE design here and you're not succumbed to any changes of utility rates potentially increasing so that's a really good place to be. That's an advantage. All things considered, if this was your starting point and you could come all the way to the right and bisect that curve, again, you'd be getting energy savings in that new design. From a cash flow point of view it would be identical and you would have the hedge against some of your utility bills. So those are some of the nice things that moving towards zero net energy can get you. This is a theoretical graph. How do we know what these efficiency measures should be? How do we know what this curve actually looks like as a function of PV cost and different climates on different building components available on the market? In theory there is a range of lots of different combinations of efficiency measures that get you anywhere here and we would like to be able to find the lowest curve to all these points, find the least cost curve that defines this whole series of efficiency or building designs. It's really important to do that because there are often a lot of ways to achieve energy savings and get to a certain point. If your goal was 50% energy savings, maybe that's right here, you could be at this point here that has a certain cost relative to it but you could also be way up here and you could be paying almost double in terms of the cash flow associated with that design. So it's really important to try to find the costs effective ways to achieve these energy savings.

Given this problem of trying to find ways to identify what these efficiency measures that make up the low cost curve are we put together an optimization strategy in BEopt called the sequential search. Here are the results. This is a very old result at this point but it's a very good demonstration of what the sequential search optimization strategy does. Here we are starting in a reference building. Again, every one of the points is a different combination of building components so it's a building design. BEopt iterated through and found this lower curve represented here. These represent first more efficient building designs in terms of energy efficiency and then at some point you can see a transition to putting on PV to get to the rest of the zero net energy. This is an actual result of BEopt where we've demonstrated that. Well, at least this sequential search can generate a curve similar to our hypothetical path to ZNE curve. How do we actually know that it's finding low cost measures? The point of optimization is that you don't want to run every possible combination of efficiency measures because that is a huge huge huge set of simulations and that would take a very long time. You want to be smart about what combinations of measures that you look at and run simulations with.

This is several dozen simulations but the full combination of what BEopt could have looked at would have been enormous. There would have been a giant cloud. The question is -- how good is this optimization search in BEopt? We've answered that question. We went off and ran every possible combination of simulation. This was something like a week worth of simulation on, I think, 50 different computers and so this gray cloud of points represents this 750,000 simulations relative to the 750 simulations that we ran in BEopt that would have taken several hours to run versus days to run on 50 different computers. The important things to note are that A the sequential search has done a very good job at finding low cost building design. Now there are not gray points that are significantly below this low cost curve. That's great. That means we found some very good cost-effective building designs. Also again, for any given level of energy savings BEopt is providing the user with a number of energy-efficiency designs that are way more cost effective than a whole bunch of other possibilities. You could be anywhere here if you were randomly trying to put together different savings components. This is a good validation that the optimization search in BEopt works well and so, like I say, this is one of the unique characteristics of BEopt and this optimization search and it's not the only. We certainly had capabilities in BEopt to just run single building design, even do single sort of "what if" analysis that can say I want to look at one building versus A, B, and C. You can use BEopt in a much simpler way and the optimization capability but we think the optimization capability fits an important piece in the Building America program for builders and others as they look towards more cost effective building designs.

The last thing I wanted to mention on BEopt is just in terms of more resources available to you. I'd strongly recommend going to the BEopt website. There are a number of different videos on it. There are training videos that you can look at for more detailed information on how to use BEopt. There's a software help file on the website and shipped with BEopt that's very good at explaining how to use BEopt. There is a forum that is quite active that we encourage you to post any questions to and the sort of BEopt team developers look at that forum quite often and answer any questions there. There are a number of different publications, different case studies, and so on using BEopt. So there is a wealth of material available to you. Again, BEopt is a free download available on the website. If you do register with the website you can ... we'll keep you updated in terms of new releases that come out and if we host more webinars or training sessions like that. That's everything that I wanted to cover on BEopt and at this point I'm going to turn it over to Noel.

Noel:

Thank-you, Scott. I am going to talk briefly about the National Residential Efficiencies Measures Database. One of the things that you may have noticed when Scott was discussing BEopt was the multitude of options available for building components to be selected and used in those optimizations. Those weren't just made up out of the air and they come from a database that we have put together called the National Residential Efficiency Measures Database or Measures Database for those that don't like to say that over and over again.

This is a screenshot of our website. The purpose of this database is to try to unify the repository for residential building retrofit measures and associated costs.

This has ... what's in this database? We have building component engineering properties. This is systems. This is wall construction. This is windows. It has the engineering properties that describe how they perform. It also has performance levels of those building components, whether they meet - for appliances - whether they meet federal appliance standards or ENERGY STAR or envelope components. It talks a lot about IECC codes. It also contains average lifetimes of the components and also an average and a range of material and labor costs from kind of a distribution from what we found and the contractor found of these components out there. So it also has employer costs. It also has combinations of efficiency measures that make sense so if we say I am going to replace this furnace with one that is more efficient. Would that actually meet the federal standards? Sometimes older components wouldn't meet more modern standards.

Here's an example of a measure you'd see in the database on the website and I'll give you the link to that later. Our initial component is a 68% AFUE furnace. It uses natural gas and say you're replacing that with a condensing furnace that has a 98 AFUE. You can see it meets all the new federal efficiency standards. The old one didn't. You can see that it meets ENERGY STAR and on the right you can see a range of costs based on the different properties. For this particular one it averages about $24 per kBtuh at capacity plus $1,100 so it's kind of like a linear function based on how big the furnace is at that particular efficiency level. That includes both the labor and material costs for that measure. Those costs are also available on the database, separate for each component, and labor costs as well. We just kind of rolled them up into one view.

I think the key thing here is we have integrated this database into BEopt and so when you go through and you are looking at those options there, they come from our database. Of course you can always create your own options if you've gotten a quote from or a price from somebody or properties for technology that is not quite listed in the database in the way you need it. You can always add it yourself but this gives a good general, kind of pick and choose, database of options. For those of you who are software developers and wanting to use this in your own applications, we make this available through our website and we also allow it to be downloaded. The entire database is a big XML file and there is a screen shot of that on the right there, just a portion of it. For more information just go ahead and go to our website or the Measures database and it's all right there. So, that's what I have.

Gail:

Well, thank-you all for those outstanding presentations and we have time now for a few questions. We already have some great questions from the audience and you may submit additional questions through the "Questions" pane on your screen. Our speakers will address as many as time allows. We have the first set of questions going to Lieko and Bethany. By "contribute content" to the field test best practices, does it show up on the website right away?

Lieko:

So, Bethany did a quick demo on this. This is a good question. There is a little bit of a turnaround period because once you create content you will mark that it needs technical review and our intent is to turn it around quickly. Some of that depends on the availability of expertise on our team. We're thinking, you know, no more than a few days or it could be that same day if we're really fast. Then it has to go over the communications, especially if there are complicated tables and things like that. So, there is a turnaround period but it's not like weeks. It's more like days.

Gail:

OK, thank-you. The next question is: I don't see any content posted under dehumidifiers and do you have some clarification about that?

Lieko:

So this is going to fall into the category of content that we have not created content for. We are still working on content so it's not like we are done at this point but dehumidifiers is definitely a topic of interest to a lot of people in the community and so it's high on our list. If you have a lot of good information about dehumidifiers, you have experience working with them, we would love to get your input. So reach out to us or write a page on dehumidifiers so we can get something on the website.

Gail:

Thank-you, and the next question is: How do I know whether a topic has already been written about? Maybe I'm looking under the wrong header.

Lieko:

This is also a good question. The easy check for that is just to use the "search" function that Bethany demonstrated and in most cases it should be pretty straightforward, like I think she showed a bunch of pages that had the word pressure in it. If you are doing something related to pressure you should be able to get to most things. Also, if you are starting to create new content, as you type in the proposed title, there will also be a drop down showing all pages that sound like that title or contain that word. If you are really not sure, I mean, if you haven't seen anything but you would find it hard to believe that someone hasn't already written something, you can go ahead and send us an email and we do monitor the Building Field Test email account. So, you know, definitely ask before you reinvent the wheel. It's also possible that no one has written anything yet.

Gail:

The next is more of a comment. If I'm in the field and need some info and don't have access to the internet, it would be nice to have a copy on the computer. Do you have plans for that?

Lieko:

We actually do have plans for this. This was part of the original plan for the website. It's just taking us a little bit of time to get to it. The original plan was to have sort of a shopping cart style. Where you could add a bunch of different pages to your shopping cart and when you were done you could create a PDF of all of those pages that then you could save on your computer exactly for that case where you were out in the field and didn't have access to the internet, but did have your computer with you. It's coming. We're working on it. Hopefully it will be a feature in the near future.

Bethany:

Hopefully you should be able to look up some stuff on your smart phone too. We don't have a mobile specific site so it won't be as pretty but if you are in a place where your cell phone has data reception then you should be able to get to some of the content.

Gail:

OK, then there was another comment that says -- please allow various sorts, especially dates.

Lieko:

Various sorts, especially dates? I'm not sure I know what that means.

Noel:

I think they want to be able to sort.

Lieko:

Oh! Sort, as in the verb. By date of? Oh, most updated. So, there is a way, if you are a content contributor, there is a way to view sort of the most recently updated content by date when it was last updated. So that's probably the easiest way to sort by date.

Gail:

A final question is - what is the name of the software used for wiki-like editing of the Field Test Best Practices website?

Lieko:

It's a Drupal website so we ... yeah, it's all Drupal and we have developers onsite that are working through the different features that we're still trying to add, if that helps.

Gail:

OK, thank-you, and now we have some questions for Scott and Noel. The first one is - does BEopt make the EnergyPlus input files available?

Scott:

I think that there are several questions with similar inquires, I guess. BEopt, behind the scenes, writes EnergyPlus high-input files and those are available to the users to use. After you run a simulation in BEopt you can go to the tools menu and then there is something called "open data directory" and that will take you right to the directory with the input file. I should point out that once you have taken those input files you can make changes to them, and so on, but you'd be doing all that outside of BEopt at that point. There's no way to make changes to an EnergyPlus idea file and then sort of bring it back into BEopt if you want to run optimization on it, but it is a use case that we definitely get people that are maybe interested in certain emerging technologies or they want to put in some sort of custom model and so they can start off with sort of modeling a building as best as possible in BEopt and get a quick EnergyPlus simple file that is appropriate for residential buildings and then taking that into the EnergyPlus environment and making further changes there. That is certainly a use case.     

Gail:

The next question is: Can I obtain a HERS index score from BEopt?

Scott:

So there are a number of software tools out there, of course, that provide a HERS rating or HERS index score. This is an area that we're actively the possibility of providing a HERS index score. We recognize, I guess, the interest that there is in terms of not having to do duplicate information in two different tools if you want to model your building in BEopt but then you also need a HERS index score in another tool. We're discussing a few different possibilities about how to do that but I suspect that we will likely support that at some point.

Gail:

Can you import your own 3D model into the BEopt software?

Scott:

So at this point I demonstrated the drawing tool in BEopt. We like to think it's a very rapid tool for getting full 3D building geometry ... 3D building geometry and that is the primary way, at this point, to get geometry into BEopt. We can't accept, at this point, geometry from another tool. Like I said you could, for example, take the 3D geometry from BEopt and create the EnergyPlus simple file from that and have that available. You could export it to another tool but there is no way to import that into BEopt.

Gail:

The next question is: What is the baseline in the optimization graph to calculate the percent savings against?

Scott:

So, there are sort of two answers to this. The simple answer is that, as a user, you've got a lot of flexibility to define what that baseline or reference building is. You can actually go through building component by building component and describe what you want your reference building to be for optimization or frankly for any energy savings of value in BEopt, whether it's individual building design or optimization. For the Building America program specifically we have a few buildings that we've automatically defined as references. So for new construction it's something called the Building America benchmark. You can get information on this in BEopt through the help menu. It's a building loosely based on IECC code compliance building, in that it's a building that changes the function of where in the country you are, what climate you're in. So that's meant to represent a typical new construction building of the same shape and size of your building but with more or less code components. That's for new construction. Then for existing buildings, if you're looking at retrofits, the existing building is essentially the default energy savings reference.

Gail:

OK. Does BEopt handle utility rates with tiers, time of use, demand charges, etc.?

Scott:

Yes, I briefly touched on this. BEopt, first of all, shifts with a number of, several thousand, utility rates around the country for both IOUs and munis and this comes from a sort of third-party website called OpenEI.org and in that website, which is a wiki-based website, there is a utility rate database that defines residential rates across the country. BEopt is automatically able to bring all that information into the tool so that if your utility supplied there you can simply use that residential rate. Those rates can be tiered, time of use, they can be both tiered and time of use, and it defines things like PV competition as well. Alternatively to that, if you can't find the rate that you want, BEopt does also have a built-in interface so that you can quickly drag your mouse and define periods for time of use, as well as tiered rates. You can even enter an 87-60 hourly real-time pricing utility rate if you wanted to do that. So it's got full flexibility for defining utility rates.

Gail:

I'll go to one for Noel right now. What about a commercial building site for Best Practices and Measures database?

Noel:

I can't really speak to the Best Practices guide but for Measures database, NREL Buildings Team has created a very similar database called a Building Component Library. You should be able to Google that and should be able to find it. That has many, many building components in it. It is a different format and everything but I think that will be what you're looking for.

Gail:

OK, and here is another question for Scott. Can a BEopt model be calibrated using real weather and utility data?

Scott:

That's a good question. I guess I would answer that in two different ways. BEopt doesn't come with any built-in ways to calibrate or provide weather data. That being said, you can provide any type of EnergyPlus weather file to BEopt. If you put your real time weather into an EnergyPlus file format, BEopt will certainly use it toward simulation. In terms of calibrating that to empirical data beyond the output that I showed in BEopt that was all annual, there are ways to get results on an hour-by-hour basis. So for any building design on the output screen in BEopt you can click it. You can chose to obtain the hourly output data and you'll get full hourly output data disaggregated by all the end uses. You can look at things like when an HVAC system is running, what the flow rates are, mean water temperature. There is a whole lot of variables made available to you that would facilitate doing calibration. BEopt certainly can be used for calibration but it doesn't have any sort of tailored interface, I would say, specifically for that purpose.

Gail:

OK, and then another question for Noel is: How can the data in the Measures database be improved? Are you looking for input from users?

Noel:

Yes. There is a link on the Measures database website if you have data you'd like to share with us. We would be happy to take it and have a discussion about how to improve the data in the database. It is based on a fairly robust dataset but it can always be better so we'd love to hear what you have.

Gail:

OK, that's all the time we have for questions today. Before we take our quick survey, I'm asking our speakers if you have any additional or closing remarks you’d like to make before we close the webinar?

Noel:

I'm OK. I'm ready.

Gail:

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The April 7 Building America webinar is now open for registration. This webinar will introduce the integrated Technology-to-Market Roadmaps that will serve as a guide for Building America’s research, development, and demonstration activities over the coming years and result in a Research-to-Market Plan in 2015.

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