New Buildings Institute (NBI) is offering a free tool to help facility executives quickly evaluate the potential energy savings associated with existing building retrofit strategies, and to identify the most promising retrofit strategies that should be part of a building performance upgrade. The Retrofit Savings Estimator uses basic information about your building and its energy saving measures to automatically perform a set of custom building energy simulations.
The Retrofit Savings Estimator is easy to use, simple to understand, highly customizable, and it’s free! The tool focuses on existing building retrofits and can be used to examine a wide variety of building types, from offices to supermarkets to schools.
To get started, you’ll need to gather some basic information about your building, including its location, the building type and size, and certain physical characteristics. Here’s what you’ll need:
- Primary Building Use Type
- Location
- Total Building Floor Area
- Number of Occupied Floors Above Grade
- Amount of Windows vs. Walls (approximate)
- Year of Construction
- Heating Equipment Type & Fuel Source
- Cooling Type
Once you have your results, you’ll be able to investigate how much energy you could save by implementing various energy savings measures. The tool will identify the most impactful measures based on basic building characteristics and provide potential energy savings associated with those upgrades. It can also predict how much energy you could save, as a percent of current usage, by implementing a custom set of measures. You can also compare multiple buildings against each other, which enables you to prioritize retrofit opportunities, define the scope of potential projects, and find out how much energy could be saved.
The Retrofit Savings Estimator was developed by NBI and The Weidt Group with support from The Kresge Foundation and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.
Want to learn more about the Retrofit Savings Estimator? Click here.
