Two special opaque construction types required by the ASHRAE 90.1 Standard, are F-factor ground floors and C-factor below-grade walls.When a site is created or when the climate zone is changed, baseline constructions and glazing systems as well as construction templates are generated for the selected ASHRAE climate zone ready for assigning to the building. Tools will be provided in future v4 releases to generate baseline building automatically from the proposed building so that both proposed and baseline buildings are stored in the same dsb file for an easy comparison of simulation inputs and outputs. Following formal ASHRAE 90.1 PRM modelling procedure, you are strongly advised to create the proposed building first and to create the baseline building from that.DesignBuilder does not currently generate different settings based on this selection, however it always generates baseline constructions and construction templates in accordance to building envelope requirements defined in 90.1 Constructions from Standard chapter 5 (detailed in Tables 5.5-1 through 5.5-8) can be selected as required for both proposed and baseline buildings.įor your proposed design you can improve the baseline construction (by copying and editing) or simply replacing them with definitions shown on architectural drawings or as built for existing building envelopes.
This loads some appropriate model data settings such as Detailed HVAC and 6 timesteps per hour to the building model.
When the Mandatory energy code is ASHRAE 90.1 2007 or 2010 then on the Add new building dialog the Model type template shows ASHRAE 90.1.In this case simply select the correct ASHRAE climate zone at site level and the baseline constructions and glazing will be automatically updated to reflect the new climate zone. In some cases the climate zone may not be the same as defined in ASHRAE 90.1 Standard Appendix D for the model location. The default climate zone loaded will have been loaded from the Locations template and that value was originally derived from the value shown on the Hourly weather data dialog which in turn was derived by analysing the. When creating a new ASHRAE 90.1 project check the ASHRAE 90.1 App G PRM checkbox on the Add new site dialog and choose one of the 1-ASHRAE 90.1-2007 or 2-ASHRAE 90.1-2010 options.ĭesignBuilder uses the ASHRAE climate zone site level setting to identify the climate zone for generating baseline constructions and glazing according to ASHRAE 90.1 building envelope requirements.This can be done manually for existing models from the Regions tab at site level, or for new models, follow the instructions in the next step. To access ASHRAE 90.1 functionality the Mandatory energy code must be set to ASHRAE 90.1 2007 or 2010.
Note: you will need the DesignBuilder LEED / ASHRAE 90.1 module to access this functionality. In the text below "Appendix G" refers to ASHRAE 90.1 Standard Appendix G. This section outlines the procedures involved in setting up proposed and baseline building models in accordance with ASHRAE 90.1 Appendix G PRM. ASHRAE 90.1 Modelling ASHRAE 90.1 Modelling