Heating & Cooling

Pilkington Sun Angle Calculator

The Sun Angle Calculator is a handy tool that provides a relatively simple method of determining solar geometry variables for architectural design, such as designing shading devices or locating the position of the sun relative to a particular latitude and time.

Pilkington Glass has kindly granted permission to SBSE to reproduce and distribute the Pilkington Sun Angle Calculator. This is a fantastic graphical design and analysis tool beloved by thousands of architects and engineers. Information on ordering copies of the Sun Angle Calculator and accessing the online manual "Designing with the Pilkington Sun Angle Calculator" will be found on the

Sun Angle Calculator Page

Regeneration-Based Checklist for Design and Construction

The SBSE version of the Malcolm Wells Wilderness-Based Checklist for Design and Construction is available in multiple languages. Environmentally sensitive construction is a global issue, perhaps an existential issue.

A Regeneration-Based Checklist for Design and Construction

If you would like to volunteer to translate the checklist into another language, download the original Excel version. Please send the translated version to Bruce Haglund for posting. Please have at least one other person check your translation to ensure accuracy.

Carbon-Neutral Design Project

The Carbon Neutral Design Project is a joint effort between members of SBSE, the AIA, and a private donor to provide practitioners, faculty, and students with the means to meet the 2030 Challenge.

The Carbon Neutral Design Project is a joint research effort between members of the Society of Building Science Educators (www.sbse.org), the American Institute of Architects (www.aia.org), and a private donor, the purpose of which is to provide practitioners, faculty, and students with the means to meet the 2030 Challenge  (www.architecture2030.org), that is, to be able to design and construct buildings to a state of carbon neutrality by the year 2030.

Solar Decathlon - Building Science Education Series

The Solar Decathlon Building Science Education series is designed to educate students and working professionals on building science principles that are paramount to the successful design of high-performance, energy-efficient buildings.

Instructional content is presented in modules, covering specific topics. Altogether, this series aims to educate viewers on:

CBE Climate Tool

The CBE Clima Tool is a web-based application built to support climate analysis specifically designed to support the need of architects and engineers interested in climate-adapted design.

The CBE Clima Tool allows users to analyze the climate data of more than 27,500 locations worldwide from both Energy Plus and Climate.One.Building.org. You can, however, also choose to upload your own EPW weather file. Our tool can be used to analyze and visualize data contained in EnergyPlus Weather (EPW) files. It furthermore calculates a number of climate-related values (i.e.

CLIMATE SCOUT

CLIMATE SCOUT helps its users design buildings that uniquely respond to a site by providing climate-specific design advice at the building scale. It pairs the Köppen-Geiger climate classification and building design strategies from Architecture 2030’s Palette.

How to use CLIMATE SCOUT

SBEED: Small Building Energy Efficient Design

SBEED is a user-friendly energy design tool shows how much money you can save by making changes for a small (commercial) building .

This new easy-to-use Design Tool starts by automatically creating a reference small non-residential building that meets California’s Energy Code. Then it automatically creates a second building that is usually about 20% more Energy Efficient. You can then copy either one and revise its design and compare it with prior versions of up to nine different designs.

HEED: Home Energy Efficient Design

HEED is a user-friendly energy design tool shows how much money you can save by making changes to your home.

This new easy-to-use Design Tool starts by automatically creating a reference house that meets California’s Energy Code. Then it creates a second home that is about 30% more Energy Efficient. You can design and compare up to nine different homes.

Climate Consultant

Climate Consultant is a simple to use, graphic-based computer program that helps architects, builders, contractor, homeowners, and students understand their local climate.

Climate Consultant uses annual 8760 hour EPW format climate data that is made available at no cost by the Department of Energy for thousands of weather stations around the world. Climate Consultant translates this raw climate data into dozens of meaningful graphic displays.

WUFI Passive - notes on every input for building a PHIUS+ 2015 or PHIUS+ 2018 energy model

An 11-page Word doc meant to help a novice to intermediate user identify and describe every input field and option in the WUFI Passive energy modeling software.

This is meant as an item-by-item inventory of every input required in WUFI Passive. I've added notes to help a new user understand the information that WUFI Passive and PHIUS require. This is very much a beta-quality resource -- there are probably a few entries that could use further clarification, if not outright correction, so please let me know how to improve it.

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