Air Systems are a collection of Zones served by common, central components such as heating coils, cooling coils, and fans. They are often the largest single piece of equipment on a project along with one of the highest cost items of the mechanical package. Finally, they have a large impact on energy consumption over the life of a building. Given their importance in size, cost, and energy sizing Air Systems correctly is of critical importance to sustainable building design.

Air Systems are sized via the EnergyPlus engine as the coincident peak of all zone and system-level loads. Coincident, or block load is the simultaneous load on the system at a specific (peak) time. The coincident load is an actual peak for the system or building taking into account the dynamic nature of individual zone loads that make up the total. The alternative to coincident load is a simplified peak load that ignores the time individual loads occur, resulting in a higher total value which is purely theoretical. To promote the right sizing of equipment all results for Air Systems, Mechanical Plants, and whole buildings are provided as coincident loads on the platform.

Note that Air System results are produced for Central Air Systems only. For Local Systems all the equipment results can be found with the Zone Results.

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Results for air systems are found on a dedicated tab on the platforms results page. Each Air System in the project can be selected to view the detailed results, including airflow, coincident loads, coil sizing, ancillary equipment loads, and checks. Selecting the cooling and heating loads will open a graphic breakdown of end uses.

All results can also be downloaded as a spreadsheet by clicking the Export Spreadsheet button under the Air System Results List. The Spreadsheet will have 2 sheets - Air Systems Results Summary and Air Systems Results All. The Summary sheet provides the key sizing information for that system, including peak loads and airflow. The All sheet provides all the detailed information calculated for the systems, including the end-use breakdown, safety factors, checks, etc.

Results can be downloaded to a standard pdf Check Summary Report which provides all the key data for each Air System. To generate this report simply click the Export pdf report button found under the Air System Result List header. The report includes the same information as the online view and is formatted to allow quick inspection of important results such as the auto-calculated checks.

Full descriptions of each result variable is available here.

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