National Energy Audit Tool for Multifamily Buildings — Development Plan

Technical Report · Thu Mar 01 00:00:00 EST 2012

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1037628· OSTI ID:1037628

Malhotra, Mini ^[1]; MacDonald, Michael ^[2]; Accawi, Gina ^[1]; New, Joshua ^[1]; Im, Piljae ^[1]

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1. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
2. Sentech, Inc., Willow Grove, PA (United States)

The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP) enables low-income families to reduce their energy costs by providing funds to make their homes more energy efficient. In addition, the program funds Weatherization Training and Technical Assistance (T and TA) activities to support a range of program operations. These activities include measuring and documenting performance, monitoring programs, promoting advanced techniques and collaborations to further improve program effectiveness, and training, including developing tools and information resources. The T and TA plan outlines the tasks, activities, and milestones to support the weatherization network with the program implementation ramp up efforts. Weatherization of multifamily buildings has been recognized as an effective way to ramp up weatherization efforts. To support this effort, the 2009 National Weatherization T and TA plan includes the task of expanding the functionality of the Weatherization Assistant, a DOE-sponsored family of energy audit computer programs, to perform audits for large and small multifamily buildings This report describes the planning effort for a new multifamily energy audit tool for DOE's WAP. The functionality of the Weatherization Assistant is being expanded to also perform energy audits of small multifamily and large multifamily buildings. The process covers an assessment of needs that includes input from national experts during two national Web conferences. The assessment of needs is then translated into capability and performance descriptions for the proposed new multifamily energy audit, with some description of what might or should be provided in the new tool. The assessment of needs is combined with our best judgment to lay out a strategy for development of the multifamily tool that proceeds in stages, with features of an initial tool (version 1) and a more capable version 2 handled with currently available resources. Additional development in the future is expected to be needed if more capabilities are to be added. A rough schedule for development of the version 1 tool is presented. The components and capabilities described in this plan will serve as the starting point for development of the proposed new multifamily energy audit tool for WAP.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 1037628
• Report Number(s): ORNL/TM--2010/328
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATION
AUDITS
COMPUTER CODES
ENERGY ACCOUNTING
ENERGY AUDITS
ENERGY EFFICIENCY
HOUSES
IMPLEMENTATION
MONITORING
PERFORMANCE
PLANNING
SCHEDULES
TRAINING
WEATHERIZATION