Building Simulation Users Group
The Building Simulation Users Group (BSUG) was created in 2009 to help to start a community centered around architecture and engineering-focused building simulation. Three years, later, BSUG secured funding for another three years from the Idaho Power Company, whom also provided funding for the 1st three years. Dubbed "BSUG 2.0" the second cycle of the group made some tweaks to its mission and aspired to provide more value to its members than just a static lecture series. Users groups are in unique positions to generate content that draws upon the diverse expertise of its members and guest lectures. This content has the potential to help support and add value to the established simulation community. The goals of BSUG 2.0 include:
- Continue to procure a lecture series from internal speakers, local experts, and regional/national/international
- Create a website to house newly archived sessions and serve as a gateway of knowledge concerning building simulation
- Create a living document that outlines the simulation protocols used by the UI-IDL on projects
- Conduct market assessments of the market penetration of building simulation in the local market
BSUG 2023
There are six lectures given each year. Lectures are split up to be presented in the first half of the year and the end of the year. Topics include energy modeling software, integrating building performance in the design process, and workflow/methods for an integrated design process. Door prizes are given away each lecture. Prizes focus on energy efficiency or related lecture topics.
Newsletter Sign-Up
Click here to sign up for the BSUG newsletter to stay up-to-date on the latest information and lecture topics.
Video Archive
All BSUG session are streamed live and then uploaded to our YouTube channel. To view past lecture please click here.
2023 Calendar
Click here to see this year schedule or past years of BSUG.
2023 Schedule
The schedule will be updated as details become available and is subject to change at any time. We are considering the following topics this year: Measures for Quality Control, Warehouses - Efficient Design & Practices, Lady Bug Pollination Tool, Benchmarking Buildings Examples, CEBECS 2018, Standard Assumption Inputs, and Better Bricks Software.
March 29th 2023 - Semhub's Energy Management Tool & Resources by NEEA
During this session, program managers for NEEA’s BetterBricks and Strategic Energy Management (SEM) programs will provide insight into the commercial building case studies, white papers, and other resources available on betterbricks.com. The session will also include an overview and live demonstration of the alliance’s Energy Management Assessment tool and insight into upcoming plans for its use in the market.
Registration OPEN: Click Here.
April 26th 2023 - Eliminating the two-week turn around by using Pollination by Mostapha Roudsair
Has the quality of your project ever suffered because you didn’t have the right information at the time you had to make a decision? Have you ever had an energy modeling consultant send you a report two weeks after you gave them design documents and all you can say is “great but the design is completely different now?”. Have you been that consultant? If so, you are not alone and you’re just experiencing an issue that persistently plagues today’s building industry.
In this presentation, Mostapha will examine the root causes of the “two-week turnaround” problem starting from the biggest reasons why environmental building performance modeling takes so long and moving down the list of challenges that make collaboration over building simulation difficult. He will show how workflows with the Pollination CAD plugins and cloud platform can mitigate these challenges and ultimately eliminate the two-week turnaround altogether.
Online Registration: Click Here.
In-Person Registration: Click Here.
May 24th 2023 - High Performance Warehouse Design by SSOE Group (HSW)
This 1-hour presentation provides a brief overview of a LEED Platinum Net-Zero Energy Warehouse designed for the National Institute of Health in North Carolina and certified (v2009) in October 2018. Using current analysis and simulation tools, David will look to validate the project’s design decisions to reduce energy use, and Simran will demonstrate how performing a Lifecyle Assessment (LCA) can be used to balance embodied carbon, cost, and performance targets on projects. As a retrospective on a project designed over 5 years ago, David and Simran will summarize whether the analysis suggests design improvements that would be beneficial to implement if designed today.
ONLINE Registration: Click Here.
In-Person Registration: Click Here.
August 23rd 2023 - Using the ERL To Benchmark Buildings by Dylan Agnes
Benchmarking is a method for measuring a building’s energy efficiency by comparing its energy use to other buildings with similar functions (commercial office, school, warehouse, etc…). Benchmarking allows owners to take a snapshot of how their building is currently performing regarding energy consumption and then compare the performance to other buildings to infer if improvements can be made. However, not everyone knows where to start or the tools they will need to gather the necessary data to calculate a building’s performance. The integrated Design Lab has an Energy Resource Library where Hundreds of diagnostic tools are available for check-out to support your next energy efficiency project. In this lecture we will be reviewing how to conduct a walk-through/audit using the ERL and additional resources from ASHRAE.
ONLINE Registration: Click Here.
In-Person Registration: Click Here.
September 20th 2023 - HVAC Controls Panel Discussion - Joint Session with ASHRAE
This lecture will be a panel style discussion on the assumption and standardization of inputs for HVAC load calculations.
ONLINE Registration: Click Here.
In-Person Registration: Click Here.
October 25th 2023 - CBECS 2018 by Dylan Agnes
Sponsored by the Idaho Power Company, the University of Idaho Integrated Design Lab (UI-IDL) developed this series of infographics to communicate how four different building types consume energy on both a regional and national level. The data used to create them has been gathered from The Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS), which is a national-level sample survey of commercial buildings and their energy suppliers conducted quadrennially by the Energy Information Administration (EIA).
The survey collects key benchmark information on U.S. commercial buildings, their characteristics, and how they consume energy. It is used by private and public stakeholders to track industry progress and gain a high-level understanding of how similar buildings compare and inform policy decisions.
Architects and engineers can also use this information for goal setting and prioritizing energy efficiency measures within the integrated design process for high performance projects. These infographics make detailed consumption data per building type easily accessible to design teams without having to filter the CBECS database themselves. Information from CBECS is reported on the EIA’s website in the form of summary tables, which provide tabular breakdowns of high-level energy consumption statistics based upon general building characteristics.
The information is also available as public use microdata spreadsheets that can be downloaded, filtered, and organized with much more flexibility than the summary tables. These spreadsheets contain much more detailed information from the building characteristics survey in its entirety and served as the origin of information for this series of infographics.
This lecture will focus on the emerging trends from the 2018 survey as well as comparing and contrasting trends identified in the 2012 survey. Specifically, the data examined from the 2012 and 2018 survey focuses on climate region 1 & 2, more commonly known as 6B & 5B ASHRAE climate zones.
ONLINE Registration: Click Here.
In-Person Registration: Click Here.
