Software: what are you using, and where do you see things trending?

For daylighting we are using Climate Studio and it is by far the best thing yet. I can give that a full recommendation. For energy, we haven’t tapped Climate Studio’s potential enough. We have been using CoveTool for energy and I keep thinking it’s going to do more for me, but honestly at this point all it does is provide an overall EUI that gives credibility to our engineer’s ballpark estimate. Its daylighting simulation is junk, as far as I’m concerned, and I have yet to get the optimization feature to give me useful information or identify feasible strategies. It’s an abusive relationship at this point. It keeps disappointing me and I keep giving it another chance, hoping it will change… We tried Insight 2-3 years ago and it was pretty useless. The challenge, as I’m sure you’re aware, is that most of these ‘simplified’ programs have a really hard time with a program-heavy building type like K12 schools that have a mix of occupancy types and HVAC systems (which is the predominant building type for us). All these software programs expect we’re only designing office buildings. They can’t seem to handle any project type more complicated than that. My high performance coordinator and I are taking a series of workshops over the next couple months. They’ll be teaching us Honeybee and the other tools they are using with students in the University of Washington’s high-performance studio. So, hopefully in April I can report back on how that goes. Kristian Kicinski AIA, LEED BD+C Associate Principal / Director of Sustainability (he,him,his) From: Michelle Amt

Hello Michelle and SDLs, We recently compared daylighting results on an university project using 3 software tools: Honeybee, Insight and CoveTool. Honeybee gave the most useful overall results: specific, believable, and detailed. Insight was most troublesome to use, but had one advantage: selecting specific rooms for the study, e.g. regularly occupied spaces, while excluding other service rooms and circulation areas. CoveTool was the easiest to use, but also the most general. Overall results were very similar to Honeybee, but less specific and detailed. However, a recent software upgrade allows you to refine the scale of the analysis grid. Our conclusion was to use CoveTool at the early design stages, switching to Honeybee if detailed analysis is important for DD, and Insight if necessary for LEED documentation for regularly occupied spaces. Hope this helps, Tamar Tamar Warburg Director of Sustainability Sasaki

I second Kristian's comment that ClimateStudio is the best at daylighting: it offers the widest range and most robust set of daylighting / solar load analyses; only Ladybug comes close.  The main improvements over DIVA are a much improved workflow and quicker feedback: low quality results can be visualized almost immediately, with accuracy progressively improving as the simulation continues to run (no having to wait for the entire simulation to complete before seeing results).  However, ClimateStudio can only be used through Rhino, which might limit accessibility to many firms. For the energy modeling side, we recently explored many different tools and decided the firm-wide tools for early modeling would be Cove.tool and late modeling would be Insight.  A few of us more proficient modelers also use other tools like Ladybug and Sefaira. Having selected the tools we want to use, we are still in the process of integrating them into our design process and getting our general design teams up to speed.  That being said, here are some thoughts here on each of our tools, with the caveat that we are a Rhino+Revit firm that primarily works on larger projects:

• Cove.tool. The general consensus of our building performance team is that this is the easiest one to learn and use for early design. In practice, we often find the geometry upload process to have quirks and issues for the larger programs we tend to design, so general design staff need some help with that part. Even more than an investigation tool, we found Cove.tool is a good energy literacy and training tool: we rely on energy modeling and mechanical consultants for detailed modeling, so having our design teams become familiar with the process is just as important as having them run energy models themselves, though we would still like to do some basic early modeling in-house. One drawback of Cove.tool is the lack of peak loads calculations, as we rely on those as much as the annual loads (EUI); Cove.tool now has an add-on that can do that for an addditional subscription, but we have not played around with it yet.  I can see this tool as being even more useful for smaller designs, like single-family residential, where geometry is less complicated and peak loads might not be as important.
• Insight. We see this as potentially very useful in later design when we are doing our documentation in Revit, as the geometry is (ideally) already there. We have not gotten to the point of actually using this at late design stages, however (still exploring it). For early design, particularly box models, the workflow is straightforward enough, but one thing that cripples it is the lack of construction and program templates that are provided in just about every other energy modeling tool. For the very first, simplest energy model, I want to be able to just give the climate zone and main program (e.g. office), and have the tool provide an appropriate initial set of constructions (R-values), occupant densities, schedules, etc. just so we can get quick first impressions. Insight was missing some or all of that, meaning we need to tediously input a lot of fairly standard values.
• ClimateStudio. This also has an energy modeling workflow. Of all the tools here, I personally found this one to be the quickest and easiest to get the first energy model up and going from a basic massing model. However, most of the other options here are much better at running the 2nd, 3rd, etc. models and exploring design variations once the first model is set up, and exploring variations is really what we want to be doing in early design. Another drawback: inputs are almost entirely in SI, which is fine in Canada and some other countries, but not very convenient in the good ol' U.S. of A. Again, this is a Rhino-only tool.
• Sefaira. The general opinion of our group is this seemed more complicated and overwhelming than Cove.tool. Personally, I (as a more proficient energy modeler) prefer this over Cove.tool: after getting over the steeper learning curve, Sefaira provides everything we would like to get out of Cove.tool, plus a lot more, like peak loads, automatic perimeter/core zoning, and thermal comfort.  It is also much easier to produce and compare multiple design iterations than Cove.tool.  However, Sefaira seems to have experienced almost no development in the last five years and the licensing arrangement is attrocious (no floating licenses unless you buy 50+ seats).  Cove.tool and some of the other tools are under active development with new features and improvements regularly being added; Sefaira will eventually get left behind.
• Ladybug. Overwhelmingly best tool of all of these for early energy modeling. If you are a Grasshopper and energy modeling expert. Otherwise, it is the worst tool. One benefit is that Ladybug is a swiss army knife and can do a lot of things that other tools cannot. Someone can learn how to do one or two specialized studies without having to learn all of Ladybug, and that has proven useful for augmenting our capabilities here beyond the "standard" energy models and daylighting studies. Another benefit: this tool has the best support and the most working examples, mainly because of the huge community involvement.

We limited our tool explorations to those that would work with Rhino or Revit, but there are certainly other good tools out there that are not included above.   Chris Savage, LEED AP BD+C
LMN Architects