A Few Questions about Trace

[Adam_Torborg]

I have been interested in energy modeling with Trace.  I have not had time to sit down and answer some questions for myself, so here goes. 

The company I work for uses gbxml files created in ABS to run the loads in Trace.  That being said, for every job, the building is already input into Trace by the project team.  These gbxml files create a space for every room and have the loads for those spaces individually set in Trace. 

There are extra calculations required for energy models though.  If I had a 140,000 sf building with 300 windows and 20-30- rooms per floor how long would something like that take to run?  I am just wondering if you would be better off making new spaces with the 15' perimeter and core areas or if you could use the already input values.  I just wouldnt want to run one of those and have it take 5 minutes every time I ran the simulation. 

Any advice?

[paulc]

If I had a 140,000 sf building with 300 windows and 20-30- rooms per floor how long would something like that take to run? 

I just finished up a 3-day training course in Trace and finished my first full energy simulation with this software.  I'm modeling a 100,000 sq ft school with approximatley 200 rooms.  I performed a full-year (8760) simulation for the proposed and baseline buildings (including the rotations).  It took about 2.5 hours to run.  The cool thing about Trace is that you can perform reduced year simulations that are a little more conservative in nature but take about 5 times less to run. I use this option when I'm fine-tuning the model and just want to get quick results.

Hope this helps
Paul