Open Studio Energy Modeling -- Any Comments?

fcborik

Hello,

I've been desperately trying to calculate the energy needs of my home, specifically trying to figure out cooling loads (and hence, how big of an A/C unit to get). Living in California, I'm going to have to comply with CA Title 24 energy requirements, and it turns out that they have a pretty good program to model the thermodynamic performance of a building. Upon further research, I found that their model was based on models developed by the US DOE, and that they had a SketchUp plug-in called "Open Studio". I've installed the plug-in, and I've skimmed through the tutorial, and it appears to be exactly (or more than) what I was looking for.

So, two questions:

Does anybody have any experience in using this plug-in? I'm interested in any tricks or problems that you may have run into. Search of the discussion boards on this forum showed some frustration with making it work with Macs (I have a PC), and then some older posts which refer to older software versions.
Is there an easy way to apply the plug-in to an existing model? I've done quite a bit of work putting a remodeling design of my house into a sketchup model for the purposes of making plans for the required building permits. It would be great if I could figure out how to do an energy analysis based on the work I've already done. However, the directions in the Open Studio plug-in seem to indicate that you have to start from scratch. Probably not too big of a deal because all I have to do is to copy components into the new Open Studio model. Just wondering if there was a way to impose Open Studio energy calculations directly within my existing model.

Thanks for any help or advice you may have.

Frank