Green Building Studio

[Anonymous]

Hello everyone, I am new to the forum so I am not sure on the rules and guidelines so please excuse me. 

I am an architecture student, currently working on a energy efficient house plan for fun and to put into practice information learned after I completed the Building Performance Analysis Certificate two years ago.

I started by making a basic form model of the house in Revit 2017 then created a analytical model with the settings I thought were most appropriate for the project and sent it to be analyzed in the green building studio server.  This is not the first time I noticed some settings I want to change but cannot find a way to, for instance building occupants and envelope infiltration which  I read is very hard to quantify. I ran a baseline analysis with the generic walls, roofs, floors etc. and once I changed the materials to what I was actually intending to use the energy consumption was pretty much to the same to my surprise. I was using 8" generic walls, 12" generic roof, 12" generic floor, and no interior walls for the baseline then for the second run with the intended materials I used 4" concrete core ICFs that are Exterior - 2.5" EPS Foam Insulation - 4" Concrete - 2.5" EPS Foam Insulation for the walls, 14" ICF Roof Decking that is Exterior 2" Concrete - 14 EPS Foam Insulation, and the floor the generic 12". I noticed that the energy usage increased for the ICFs which decreased the energy consumption insignificantly.  .  I am considering running a baseline with the typical construction and minimum insulation values for the location specified in the project in order to see if it has a more drastic change.

Energy Efficient Strategies

I am trying to apply the information learned in the BPA and in college to design better buildings but I am not getting the results I am expecting. I started this project how we start projects in school by assigning myself a project statement, program list, and project goals, then I gave myself a region, county, and city in which the proposed project would be "built." Then I looked at the climate zone for the region and the: average high/low temperatures, annual precipitation, high/low temperatures, flood plain, humidity, wind rose diagrams, cloud coverage etc. using various online sources. Then I looked for building strategies that would help in this hot-humid region of the United States using notes taken from the BPA courses, notes from college, and other online sources. Which all said pretty much the basics are:

1) Orienting the long axis of the building east to west in order to minimize east-west sun exposure which causes the   most heat gain

2) Having a cool roof which is a roof that reflects the suns rays and is painted a light color to decrease the absorption of the rays

3) Minimize east/west glazing and if needed shield glazing with covered patios or vegetation

4) Consider prevailing winds in order to achieve natural ventilation, increase natural ventilation by placing small inlets low in the walls facing the prevailing wind and place larger outlets not directly opposite the inlets high in the wall

5) Use a double roof that shades the primary roof and some walls if wanted and has an air cavity that circulates air and lowers the temperature between roofs

6) Calculate overhang based on the latitude, direction the glazing is facing, height of glazing, and height above glazing

7) Light shelves, daylight controls, and shading devices for glazing varies from which direction they face

Those are a couple of the basic strategies I looked into for this project, but as for the building materials I am very interested in ICFs because of their apparent ease of installation, disaster proof qualities, sound mitigation, and continuous insulation. Whereas most of the homes are wood studs that are easily destroyed in natural disasters, fires, floods, allow a lot of sound to enter the interior and within the interior and need more specific labor. So I have been researching into ICFs for a couple of weeks and found them to be an interesting material.

My concern is that it seems like the strategies I am applying have no significant impact on the energy consumption of the building. So I am wondering if I am misusing the information I have found or misusing revit and the building green studio.

[Anonymous]

First of all you are still using the old Energy Efficiency feature in Revit. I would suggest you try Insight Energy Optimization. It’s a new way of performing energy analysis by automatically running nearly 250 parametric runs on the main parameters that impact energy usage. You then can use the interactive features to quickly understand how . Here is more information: https://www.autodesk.com/products/insight/overview and Insight Workflow Videos

How To's: Building Performance Analysis & Optimization in Revit and FormIt Pro Using Insight

Go to the Insight downloads page  and simply install the plugin for the version of Revit you are using.

The intent of Insight is to help you quickly understand how different factors might impact the energy performance of your project.

 The Energy Cost Range (ECR) values shown when you first view the Insight result are the mean, minimum, and maximum of the cost or energy use intensity (EUI) calculated with all ranges selected for each factor. (The initial Insight mean value result, is not the result of just model’s settings—it is the mean of the range of all the factor settings. If you want to see the result of your model’s settings, in each factor widget choose the BIM value).

These ECR/EUI calculations are based upon the 240+ parametric runs that are automatically generated by Insight. The reason for starting out with such a large range is based upon the idea that early in the design phase of a project there are many specifics that are not yet decided upon or known, such as maybe the architect does not yet know what type of glass they will use in the project—or maybe not even how much glass for each façade of the model.

 By examining the graph of each factor widget you can easily see how much impact various factors might have on your project. The sensitivity of your project to these factors will differ based upon many things, such as the location (weather), use type (i.e. office, vs school, vs residential, etc.), building geometry, etc. If a factor graph is very steep that means there is a large difference in the energy cost and energy use intensity between the most efficient option and the least efficient option. For example if the curve of the graph for lighting efficiency is very steep this indicates that focusing on using more efficient lighting in your project will have a greater impact on the energy performance that other factors—perhaps the curve of the graph for wall insulation is fairly flat so maybe it doesn’t make sense to invest a lot of extra money in very highly insulated walls. The values shown when you hover your mouse over each point on the graph indicates the change in cost or EUI from the mean result. All of this information will help guide your design decisions and optimize your building’s energy performance.

 As you select the various factors and narrow down the range, or choose a specific setting, the ECR results will dynamically be updated. This is based on the complex interaction of all of the components of a project and how they impact one another.

With Insight you can also analyze several different geometries of your project by creating another Revit model, generating Insight, and then move the model designs for your project into one Insight gallery. This allows you to quickly see the energy performance differences between the different geometries.

There are some limitations to the factors that can be included in Revit for the energy efficiency analysis: infiltration; shading using Revit vegetation elements—use mass shapes (without including mass floors) to model the effects of external shading.

Depending upon climate and building usage type, the envelope of a project won’t always have a huge impact compared to internal loads such as lighting or HVAC efficiency. However your project shows a 10% difference in EUI, which seems reasonable if you are only changing the envelope.

[Anonymous]

Hello marjoriestein,


I downloaded Revit 2018 with the 2018 Insight plugin sometimes this past week, because I found that there was a newer analysis add-in, like you said. The problem I am having is it does not let me login or look at my runs. I opened my Revit 2017 file and updated as to run it with Revit 2018 and created an energy model and followed the steps of setting the project location and settings. When I click on generate seems like it exports the model because on the bottom left it shows like a loading bar, but after I leave it running for about an hour and click on optimize it gives me "Error: There was an unhandled error on application." I tried logging in to the A360 separately to check the results but it gives me the same results.

[Anonymous]

Hi @Anonymous,

I responded to your other post, but I see from this post where you are encountering the error.

When the analysis is complete you should receive an email indicating the Analysis Complete and it will include a link to the analysis results. There is a problem with trying to access the results in the Revit Optimize tab.

Runs can take a while if there is a lot of traffic on the servers. Student accounts are given lower priority in the queue than paying customers. 

If you are not receiving the emails try logging into Green Building Studio (the back-end service used by Insight). You will see the list of your projects. The Insight project should have 247 or 248 runs. If it does not, either the runs are still processing, or there was a simulation failure (in which case you should have received an email indicating the analysis failed). Click on the project and you will be taken to the runs list where you can confirm if runs are still processing, or if there was a failure. If there was a failure you can mouse over the red X and get the error message. Let me know what the error says.

[Anonymous]

Okay, I will check right now.
Thank you for the help