ASHRAE 209 Energy Simulation Aided Design for Buildings except Low-Rise Residential Buildings is published by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE). It defines the minimum requirements for providing energy design assistance using building energy simulation. This standard applies to new buildings or major renovations using energy simulation during the design process.

It has several General Requirements and Design Modeling Cycles.

cove.tool can be used for the following Requirements and Modeling Cycles;

cove.tool's simulation software complies with the minimum requirements of ASHRAE/IES Standard 90.1, Section G2.2.

Prior to Modeling Cycle #2 or Modeling Cycle #3, site characteristics and local climate information should be reviewed to document a list of design strategies that include; Dry Bulb Temperature, Relative Humidity, Wind Speed and Direction, etc. You can get this data from the climate analysis report on cove.tool.

cove.tool uses AIA 2030 to benchmark energy use of buildings with the same principal building activities to compare and establish project performance metrics.

Prior to Modeling Cycle #2 or Modeling Cycle #3, the project owner, the energy modeler and other building team members can document and discuss the overall project energy performance goals established in 5.4 Benchmarking.

This step is common for all the Design Modeling Cycles [6]. It requires reporting of input and output data that can be easily found on cove.tool such as - Project Location, Weather Station Name, Occupancy, Gross Floor Area, Internal Loads, etc.

This modeling cycle applies before the building's geometry and site orientation have been decided and is used for identifying the distribution of end to end energy use. The Manual mode on cove.tool can be used for this.

This step involves performing comparative analyses of architectural conceptual designs to compare the change in peak heating and cooling loads with identical HVAC systems.

Based on the selected baseline design, the annual energy end use has to be calculated and a list of load reduction strategies has to be identified that may include - Building Envelope, Lighting, Internal Equipment Loads, etc.

This modeling cycle should be started after Modeling Cycle #3 and should compare at least 2 types of HVAC systems. cove.tool has more than 80 different System Types that can be used for this modeling cycle.

The project's first cost can be identified in the optimization page on cove.tool. The first cost and operating cost of each project alternative can be evaluated in this modeling cycle.