Phius Project Certification Manager Al Mitchell breaks down the newly developed REVIVEcalc tool used for REVIVE 2024 project certification.
A few weeks ago, Phius released the much-anticipated, resilience-focused, standard for retrofitting buildings, REVIVE 2024. To support practitioners pursuing the new standard, we are releasing a new REVIVE 2024-specific simulation tool: REVIVEcalc!
REVIVEcalc is a lightweight, intuitive software that guides Phius professionals to achieve REVIVE 2024 certification. The tool enables users to simulate their customized retrofits and experiment with the life cycle cost, resilience and energy performance of different retrofit packages.
We’ve seen some comparisons being made between REVIVEcalc and the existing analysis software, WUFI. In general, we tried to keep the level of detail and ease of use similar. WUFI Passive is a static simulation tool, meaning that it uses monthly average temperatures to determine the energy use of the building in a given configuration and sums the monthly data to get the annual totals. While this is a super efficient tool for calculating energy consumption, it cannot do more detailed hourly analysis, which is necessary for the thermal resilience calculations that are a hallmark of REVIVE 2024.
Previous studies done by Phius used WUFI Plus, which is a dynamic, hourly simulation tool. However, WUFI Plus cannot account for the performance of mechanical equipment, and entering the internal gains is fairly complicated. When we started exploring the REVIVE 2024 standard, we used EnergyPlus, the flagship energy modeling engine from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), but we understand that it has a steep learning curve. To solve this conundrum, we developed REVIVEcalc as a wrapper for EnergyPlus, aiming to automate the simulation process a little, and get a high-powered tool into the hands of our constituency with no more difficulty than the current WUFI modeling process.
So what does the REVIVEcalc simulation do? In accordance with the REVIVE 2024 standard’s priorities of resilience, health, and decarbonization, there are two critical pieces to the REVIVEcalc tool.
The first is for resilience, where we test how the building maintains habitable conditions for the occupants during a week-long power outage in both the summer and winter.
The second is for cost and environmental impact, where we analyze the building’s energy usage over years of normal operation.
The results from these simulations are then used to construct the Annualized Decarbonization of Retrofitted Building (ADORB) cost projection, which can be helpful when comparing different building retrofits.
Simulating different retrofit configurations using the REVIVEcalc tool is highly customizable, with around 50 building attributes to specify, such as building materials, air sealing, photovoltaics, and much more! These configurations are read from a simple CSV file. REVIVEcalc provides an interface to construct these spreadsheets. Each row in the CSV represents one retrofit package to consider. The user can create as many cases as needed and run the whole list as a batch.
Look forward to new features coming out with the v24.2 release:
We expect REVIVEcalc will be a helpful tool for your REVIVE 2024 journey! You can download the app for free from our Github repository, in the releases tab here. This is an open-source project, so anyone can make suggestions and leave input on what they would like to see in version v24.3!
Many thanks to Jackie McAninch for her hard work helping bring REVIVEcalc to fruition. As Jackie moves on from her internship here to her full time position elsewhere, we wish her the best of luck!
As always, we are here to help every step of the way on your REVIVE 2024 and REVIVEcalc journey! Don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions.
