Transition from Trace 700 to what?

[EnergyProfessional]

In 1-2 years support for T700 will end. I had used it for multiple years for load calculation and energy simulations. It has its limitations, but it works. any error is easily resolved.

The real only limitation is that one enters the rooms manually without "seeing" the building. gbXML also is clunky and needs a lot of corrections. other than that, it just works. system and plant setup is easy and errors are obvious.

I had tried "IES VE 2019" and "Trace 3D Plus". Both of them are front ends to EnergyPlus. The only nice thing I have to say is that they have a nicer way of creating the building and you can "see" the building.

Both of them are clunky, come up with un-resolvable errors that are hard to trouble-shoot and so on. they feel like they need some more years of development. And that is before i even try complex buildings and systems. I'm a heavy Revit user, also use EES and so on. So I'm not a luddite.

Did you guys come across load/energy software that works as well as T700, but with a more modern UI to create the building? or what is your experience if you also used T700 and tried IES VE and Trace 3D?

 

[nglty]

Trace 700 is really a coil sizing program. Period. It claims that it can do a lot of things, such as modeling UFAD, VRF, chilled beams,etc. It does a lousy job at any simulation. in a LCC, it is even worse. Suggest that you grad energy use from Trace and input into BLCC (free from NIST).
Can you imagine that you cannot docummet thermal comfort LEED point with Trace 700 output? Our entire work is about comfort, and here we cannot document comfort, this should be low-hanging fruit.
Can you imagine all these softwares not capable of plotting a psychrometric chart?
This is an area (of many) where out ASHRAE fails its members big time. ASHRAE should have a program for everyone that is reliable. But , you know ASHRAE, they are a for-profit organisation, they're not into doing good, just making money.

 

[EnergyProfessional]

I have no way of knowing if the results of T700 are accurate. But at least T700 executes the simulation if you provided all data. If a value was set wrong, the results looked odd an an experienced engineer can find the problem. But at least it will work.

T3D, on the other hand, just gives an error out of the EnergyPlus engine and let's you guess which value it may not like. The front end (the actual Trace 3D software) doesn't do any of the error checking, and gives no hint that something is wrong. So for simple problems you have to send the file in to support. Really annoying.

I'm not expecting ASHRAE to provide anything. I see the ASHRAE books that look like they were written in 1970s..............