l. Course Name & Number: Energy Scheming, Arch 498/598

2. Instructor/office/ext.: G.Z. Brown, Jeff Kline, Tomoko Sekigichi,
103 Pacific Hall, University of Oregon Campus (541) 346-5647

3. Meeting Time & Place: This class is offered over the world wide web and has no regularly scheduled meeting time. Students can proceed at a location of their choice, however, submissions must be turned in by submission due dates found in the ES course handout.

4. Meeting Format: This class is composed of a series of exercises and two exams.

5. Credit hours and grading: 3 credits graded or nongraded. An extra one credit is also available. Talk to your instructor about this.

6. Prerequisites: Arch 591, Environmental Control Systems, equivalent course, or permission of the instructor. Familiarity with Macintosh computers is desirable.

7. Study Objectives:

• Learn to think about building form and organization and energy simultaneously
  
  
• Learn to think in terms of whole building energy performance rather than in terms of isolated systems
  
  
• Learn how solar heating, passive cooling, daylighting, shading, ventilation affect building performance
  
  
• Learn how climate affects building performance
  
  
• Learn how internal gains from people, lights and equipment affect building performance
  
  
• Learn the computer program, Energy Scheming
  
  

8. Study Vehicles:

• Instructions on how to operate Energy Scheming
  
  
• Short exercises which incrementally teach various aspects of Energy Scheming and energy efficient building design
  
  
• Discussions of exercises to understand thermal building performance
  
  
• Project--design of a building using a past or current studio project
  
  
• Examinations on the use of Energy Scheming to determine why and how buildings use energy
  
  

9. Text:
Energy Scheming software and manual

Available at Energy Studies in Buildings Laboratory, Room 103 Pacific Hall, Department of Architecture, University of Oregon, Eugene, 97403

Price $54.95 with student ID

10. Instructor Comment:

With Energy Scheming you can think about building form and energy use together, right at the beginning stage of design. Thinking about energy at the start, when you are first making sketches of a building's form and organization, makes it easier to consider energy all the way through the project. Thinking about energy strategies early--daylighting; passive solar heating and cooling; and cross and stack ventilation, for example--makes sense because they affect how the building looks and determine its loads and its mechanical systems. When you reduce building loads, you save energy.

Energy Scheming is a design tool, not an analysis or evaluation tool. It is designed to help you create an energy-efficient building rather than to evaluate one that's already been designed. Its user interface lets you work intuitively, so you can experiment and generate ideas quickly while Energy Scheming takes over the calculations and evaluations.

Input to Energy Scheming requires relatively little technical detail. You use graphic tools, such as a digital tape measure to "take off" locations and dimensional data such as areas and lengths, by tracing areas from on-screen drawings. The result appears on the screen in numerical form. When you specify materials, such as brick or wood, Energy Scheming translates these into physical properties such as conductance.

Energy Scheming can handle more building types and energy conservation strategies--such as passive solar heating, night ventilation of mass, clear sky and overcast sky daylighting, and stack ventilation--than many other energy software programs.

Energy Scheming gives you instantaneous rule-of-thumb guidance on solar heating, ventilation, and daylighting for windows. You can simultaneously compose an elevation for appearance and size the windows for energy considerations.

Energy Scheming gives you speedy and frequent evaluations. Energy Scheming's calculation procedures allow the kind of rapid feedback that is imperative to the beginning of the design process, when precise predictions of energy use are not critical. It proceeds rapidly because the algorithms are simplified to reduce calculation time. Very quickly you can get a "ball park" evaluation and compare alternatives. Energy Scheming evaluates the building's loads for 24 hours for four selected days.

Energy Scheming gives you an element by element evaluation of your building in bar graph and tabular form. You can look at total loads for a whole day or just one hour. You can get a detailed report on individual elements,such as windows or walls, so you can see which element of the building is causing excess gain or loss for that hour or day.