Corrie

Features

Corrie is a software program for providing building design advice based on building performance simulation. It is intended for very early in the design process before even the building shape has been decided. The software may be used for ASHRAE Standard 209 Modeling Cycle #1 “Simple Box Modeling.” The software may be useful as part of a bid or before a charrette. It requires only a few inputs and uses EnergyPlus and OpenStudio to produce a series of simulations that explore how the building design is impacted by a variety of energy efficiency measures such as:

• floorplate aspect ratio
• number of stories
• orientation
• wall insulation
• roof insulation
• amount of windows
• lighting power

Corrie creates a PowerPoint presentation based on the simulation results for the measures selected and options chosen. Each type of measure is shown as a graph on a slide with energy usage for each of the options selected. In addition, a slide with the end-use breakdown is included as well as a slide on the assumptions used.

Installing Corrie

To install Corrie on Windows:

• First, install OpenStudio 2.8.0 Other versions of OpenStudio have not yet been tested with Corrie and may not work. Corrie does not use the OpenStudio SketchUp plugin. If you do not have SketchUp (2017 or 2018) then deselect the plugin when installing OpenStudio.

• Download the latest Corrie.zip file from releases. You may need to click on "assets" to see the zip file.

• Unzip the Corrie.zip file to a directory like c:\Corrie

While Corrie should also work on Linux and MacOS, they have not been tested yet. If you want to try it on Linux or MacOS clone the repository and let me know if it works.

Tutorial

To run Corrie, double click on the Corrie.exe file in the directory that you installed corrie. It may be in:

C:\corrie\corrie.exe

This should open up the user interface:

Select the building, the direction the front of the building faces, and the baseline code where the building is located using the dropdown options.

You may notice that a "CMD" or "DOS" window opens at the same time. This can generally be ignored but does show you what is going on during the simulations.

Select a weather file by clicking on the "..." button . If you don't have a weather file, you can download an EnergyPlus epw file from climate.onebuilding.org

Enter the main occupancy areas for the building. For many buildings, only one occupancy area is shown, but some buildings have multiple occupancy areas. If you don't need one, leave it as a zero.

For each slide, you click on the option being simulated will show up next to it.

Each checked option under each slide that is checked represents an individual simulation so you may want just to have a few checked to begin with to see if everything is working for you. After that you can check as many as you want but will take some time to simulate many options with EnergyPlus. You can also change the order that the slides appear by using the Up and Down buttons.

Next, save your file using the File menu. This should automatically create the name of the PowerPoint file that is created. The PowerPoint file must be closed and is overwritten each time the simulations are run.

Next, click "Run Simulations" and work on something else for a while.

The "CMD" or "DOS" window will show many errors and warnings. You don't need worry about these but the window does show some of the steps that are occuring during the simulations.

When the simulations are complete, find where you saved your file and open the PowerPoint file to see the results. The slide deck should start with a slide showing the selections you made and look something like:

The next slides should correspond to each one you selected.

For now, only the total net site energy is being reported.

An end-use breakdown is also included as is a summary of the selected option for each slide (the one with the lowest net site energy).

You may want to copy and paste the slides you want into another presentation file because they will be overwritten when you click "Run Simulation" the next time.

Support

Ask questions on BLDG-SIM or on Unmethours.

You can post issues under the issues tab above if you find any bugs.

Status

This is just an Alpha version. I have a lot of additional features in mind. I welcome your feedback.

Linux

You need python, and you'll need wxPython, which needs some development libraries since wxPython cannot supply binaries on PyPI For Linux. Please refer to wxPython's wiki for more information. There are prebuilt binaries you can install (much easier) - refer to end of the wiki - or you can try build your own.

For eg: to install with gtk3 on a ubuntu 16.04:

pip install -U \
      -f https://extras.wxpython.org/wxPython4/extras/linux/gtk3/ubuntu-16.04 \
      wxPython

Other requirements (@JasonGlazer, create a requirements.txt at root of your repo instead)

pip install pypubsub
pip install python-pptx