Green Star Buildings V 1.0 Reference HVAC Systems

Defining a reference project HVAC system in Green Star Buildings v1.0 can be fiddly. We have now built HVAC templates that are more advanced than our standard EnergyPlus ones (primarily to support ASHRAE 90.1 compliance), which gives you a quicker and clearer way to pull together the Green Star reference building HVAC requirements for your projects. These are only available on the Premium Plan.

In our experience, the reference building can be resolved very quickly once you have delivered a J1V3 model. You have already determined the reference requirements for the fabric, so the ASHRAE 90.1 templates we already have available should get you perhaps 80% of the way to your reference building specification. The remaining 20% is where it gets interesting, because plenty of Green Star reference systems need specific configurations that no template will guess for you.

To cover that process, we have just released a 38-minute tutorial that walks through the steps so you can build these for your own projects. As usual, it sits in our on-demand courses with a Q&A at the end. Score 80% or better and you are entitled to a pat on the back for a job well done.

And if you have ideas for making this process more transparent, or even faster, please get in touch. We will be building out our HVAC systems over the next few months, and your suggestions can shape what we add.