SBIC's Small Commercial Buildings

 
Green Building Guidelines
ENERGY-10® Software Modeling Software
ENERGY-10® Software Workshop
ENERGY-10® Software Web Forum
Peer Reviews and Design Charrettes

SBIC’s Small Commercial Buildings program was developed to help architects, engineers, builders, and their clients create energy-efficient and environmentally sensitive small and medium-sized commercial, institutional, and residential buildings.  Our publications, resources, and training programs promote the notion of building designers applying energy-efficient strategies early in the design process by combining passive solar design techniques, such as daylighting and shading, and conventional energy-saving measures, such as insulation and high-efficiency lights. The goal of the program is to educate thousands of architects, engineers, building designers, academics, and students in the United States to apply these approaches as part of the normal design process.  With the inception of the this program, SBIC for the first time stepped beyond a focus on passive solar design techniques for homes and into the realm of addressing the unique challenges faced in designing climate-responsive, small commercial (internal load dominated) buildings.   The key tool for this program is the ENERGY-10® software, a powerful design tool that analyzes—and illustrates—the energy and cost savings that can be achieved through more than a dozen sustainable design strategies. The software is designed to help architects and building professionals generate data on a building’s energy-efficiency strategies quickly and easily, with minimal upfront information. Hourly energy simulations help the designer quantify, assess, and clearly depict the benefits of daylighting, passive solar heating, natural ventilation, well-insulated envelopes, better windows, lighting systems, mechanical equipment, solar hot water heating, photovoltaics, and more.

We developed a special classroom workshop to give designers the opportunity to participate in discussions about integrated design practices, as well as receive hands-on ENERGY-10® software instruction. It covers 16 energy-efficiency strategies that software users need to understand in order to use it effectively.
 

·         Daylighting

·         Glazing

·         Shading

·         Energy-efficient lighting

·         Lighting controls

·         Insulation

·         Air leakage control

·         Thermal mass

·         Passive solar heating

·         Natural ventilation

·         Economizer cycle

·         Exhaust air heat recovery

·         High-efficiency HVAC

·         HVAC

·         Evaporative cooling controls

·         Solar water heating