Title 24 Compliance

[aland82]

Has anyone completed a Title 24 simulation and used it for plan check?

the forms that IES produce are different from Energy Pro and the plan checker refused the IES forms.

This is a big problem for us.
my company was about to purchase the full IES suite because we currently use trane trace and that is a pile of sh!t, but now they want to make sure this is resolved before they move forward.
we have also cancelled the licences that we bought for the T24 compliance portion until this is resolved.

[PCully]

Hi,

Have you raised this with your local IES representative or the Technical Support team at all? If not then please do, I'm not sure how much of the output is driven by the VE interface or how much comes from CBECC-COM interfacing to EnergyPlus but I'm sure we can find some resolution to this as you can't be the first or only person it has affected.

Phil

[Liam]

Phil - aland82 now already knows the following, but for the sake of the forum;

IES are 100% up to date with the requirements of the performance approach of Title 24 Compliance, this approach requires software.
The additional reports required by a local plan-checker are not part of the performance approach for compliance, nor do they require software. The separate mandatory reports that are part of the prescriptive approach.

CBECC-Com or IES might consider auto-generation of such prescriptive forms in the future. I can repost if something becomes official.

Thanks,
Liam

[Timothy]

Liam's reply above does a very nice job of answering the main question here regarding the forms and making clear that the software is needed specifically for the performance-based analysis and to generate just the forms currently provided by the IES Title-24 module. The Prescriptive compliance forms requested by the plan checker are another matter, and can be manually completed if the plan checker insists upon these (no software-based modeling or simulation is required for these forms).

The "new" forms generated via the IES Title-24 module are actually produced by the report generator that is part of the CBECC-Com Compliance Manager for Title-24-2013. The IES Title-24 module uses this Compliance Manager as is required by CA law for the 2013 version of Title-24 Energy Code. Presently, EnergyPro is "conditionally" approved for use in its current form only through the end of 2014, at which point that software will be required to adopt the very same CBECC-Com Compliance Manager for the Performance-based path to compliance. Furthermore, EnergyPro has a 2D geometry interface rather than 3D and there are a number of aspects of the 2013 version of Title-24---daylighting controls, for example---that cannot be modeled in the current version of that software. In other words, it can be used through the end of the 2014 to model what it is capable of modeling, but cannot model all parameters that can be modeled in CBECC-Com user interface and the IES Titlt-24 module that provides interface and 3D geometry input to the CBECC-Com Compliance Manager.

The California Energy Commission (CEC) is aware of the situation and have stated that the plan checkers belief that they need many of the Prescriptive forms completed as part of the submittal for the Performance path to Title-24 compliance is, for the most part, a misunderstanding that they plan to clear up. The CEC is also aware that the CBECC-Com Compliance Manager they have provided, and upon which the IES Title-24 module depends, is currently not meeting the expectations of plan checkers in this regard, and therefore that they need to address this one way or another. When the CEC provides a solution and/or clarifies the situation for the plan checkers with regard to needing Prescriptive forms to be submitted when a project is completing Performance-based compliance, the IES Title-24 module will be updated accordingly. Until then, the IES Title-24 module for the Performance-based path to compliance is complete as required by the CEC for a compliance submittal.