The New Buildings Institute (NBI) is providing a free tool to help building owners quickly evaluate the potential energy savings associated with existing retrofit strategies. The Retrofit Savings Estimator is a web-based analysis engine that uses basic building information to automatically perform a set of custom building energy simulations. The focus is on existing building retrofits for a wide variety of building types from offices to supermarkets to schools.
To get started, users input some basic building data such as total building area, building type, year of construction, and type of heating or cooling equipment. The intent is to utilize information that’s easily available to owners and managers.
The results identify a set of the most impactful measures based on basic building characteristics and identify potential energy savings associated with those upgrades. The tool can also predict how much energy could be saved, as a percent of current usage, by implementing a custom set of measures. Users can define a subset of the recommended measures to determine the impact of those choices.
Once a user has determined their retrofit opportunities, they can print the results and use them to compare multiple buildings in their portfolio against each other to prioritize retrofit opportunities, define the scope of potential projects, and find out how much energy could be saved from a deep energy retrofit.
