Modelling an existing building in DesignBuilder/EnergyPlus: Custom versus default inputs

This paper describes an effort to build and partially validate an energy model of an existing educational building located in Cambridge, MA, USA. This work was carried out as part of a research seminar for graduate architecture/design students and included four related tasks: Modelling the building’s geometry and thermal properties in DesignBuilder/EnergyPlus, generating a site-specific weather file based on near-site measured data, assessing internal load schedules based on a detailed building survey, and collecting monthly metered data for heating lighting and cooling over a whole year.