With Trace 700 going the way of the dinosaurs, what are you transitioning to?

We are using IESVE more and more.  It's a process and we're still not efficient but it's inevitably the direction we are moving for loads.

A couple years ago we migrated our entire firm and all our offices away from Trane Trace and to IES VE.  It was painful...and is still a work in progress!

Good thread Kim. I am curious how others are handling it as well. Our engineers elected to migrate to Trace 3D - and are still experiencing some growing pains there. Jury is still out I think but they are producing loads for their projects there. We had considered IES. Pricing structure is a challenge (we have 30+ offices). New platform is a barrier too for engineers that haven't been there before. We feel that having a connection to energy analysis is important too (Trace 3D has failed for us there so far). We have been using energyplus (Design Builder) in part for the last 7 years and are currently migrating all projects over there. It is currently as separate build from the load model, but we have felt there are advantages with scripting and automating processes/reports/database downstream from the energy model with energyplus; this is a work in progress. It also seems that many other platforms out there are organizing around energyplus so that keeps integration with those future options open as well (We have not used IESVE but 'feel' like it is an island on its own - that may not be true at all). We have also felt that organizing around energyplus may allow us to automate loads and downstream process there but have not yet pursued that path yet. If anyone is interested in collaboration on that path, I would be interested to discuss. Adam McMillen, PE, CPHC, LEED AP BD+C Director of Sustainability [IMEG Corp.] IMEG Corp. 1100 Warrenville Road | Suite 400W | Naperville, IL 60563 (630) 527-2320 | phone (312) 852-1360 | mobile (630) 527-2321 | fax Adam.M.McMillen@imegcorp.com website | my linkedin | vCard | map | regional news [Twitter][Facebook][LinkedIn] Learn more about us and the IMEG story! This email may contain confidential and/or private information. If you received this email in error please delete and notify sender.

Thanks for the reminder Kim. We tried to push IES-VE out to all the design engineers with limited success over the last decade. Not surprisingly, some of the young whippersnappers picked it right up but the old guys have been sneaky about keeping Trace around. That also probably means our modeling group will be fielding a bunch of emergency help calls for load calcs they need done once they lose access, so it's a good reminder to get ahead on it. 

Like most others who have responded, a bit of a mixed bag for me. I'm going through transition from Trace to IEV-VE at a second firm now, and uptake of lessons learned have had ixed results. Veteran engineers definitely hold tight to what they know with Trace, younger team members seem to pick up the transition to IES much faster. Our analytics team have deeper IES knowledge, but similar to Adam are more frequently using energyplus as a priority preference for energy modeling and custom scripting. We do like some of the other modeling capabilities inside of IES modules for solar analysis, visualization, flow analysis. So growing pains in the transition from Trace to IES remain, and we're leveraging additional lessons learned from our colleagues in our UK offices who have previously transitioned to IES. 

I feel a lot of the same issues I mentioned back in my January 2020 post (the more things change the more they stay the same?) are still valid over here. We've now "transitioned" to IES-VE for loads... officially. It seemed the most reasonable step after evaluating other options at the time. But there are still the Trace 700 hangers-on and PM's who will run Trace loads to 'check' IES calculations done by others. Now we've even come full circle to 'well... maybe we should check into Trane 3D Plus because it seems like they've improved some of the issues?' The main interest for us was interoperability with load and energy modeling geometry but... wait for it... IES-VE is challenging to use for energy modeling, also. 

The white whale we still want is an operable gbXML geometry that can be used for both loads and energy modeling. Oh, and it would be nice if we didn't have to create that from scratch but somehow clean up the Revit / SketchUp / Rhino model from the architect. If someone has this figured out they are clearly holding it close, because time and time again I keep coming up with the 'best' way to do this is to just create a new closed geometry. We've seen a lot of development in Energy+ for modeling also, though I think there's a larger gap to breach in 'trusting' it for loads.

I continue to be jealous of lighting designers who can take a model essentially directly from architectural into their software. So I would be happy to offer up someone to Adam's working group (that is what you were proposing, right?) ;) Would like to say we have some comfort level with the Revit load plug-in or things like Cove's load modeling tool... but, we're just not there yet. It's like some engineers are resistant to change or something. 

Hi Sarah - Pollination plugins for Revit and Rhino are the closet thing the industry has seen in terms of BIM to BEM workflows. Better success than previous GBXML workflows. Mostapha and his team are great to work with.    https://www.pollination.cloud/revit-plugin https://www.pollination.cloud/rhino-plugin

I have been having a lot of success using Pollination to import models from Revit to IESVE via the GEM file export.  Still something else to learn, but it seems to be saving a lot of time.

Kim, We've had good success shifting to E+ for loads (integrated into our Mechanical work flow based on us creating a clean loads version of the Revit model). We have found an effective way to then leverage for our energy modeling as well. The loads piece was much easier than building an effective process/knowledge base around energy modeling in E+, especially for large and/or complex buildings and systems. Paul