As of today, May 23, 2016 at 10:03 AM Mountain Time, we have released an upgrade to our modeling engine.
In most cases, the impact of the changes will be quite small: a 0 to 3% increase in overall savings. In some cases, where fuel switching occurs or where the base duct work is really inefficient, the savings could increase by as high as 15%. Also, the default improvements for DHW have increased in the Energy Factor (EF) and overall costs.
Tank water heaters will now default to a 90EF tankless water heater and Electric water heaters will default to a 325 EF heat pump water heater. You will only see the changes if you click on the Model It button after you receive this announcement.
To give you some examples, we’ve run a comparison on a bunch of test homes to show you the difference between the new and old modeling. In all circumstances the overall MBTU savings goes up or stays the same. Here is that comparison:
A PDF of the comparison chart can be found below.
For users who participate in an incentive program that has both a test-in and test-out validation for incentives, you will likely see a difference in the incentive on the test-out. But since all test cases show an overall increase in energy savings, you should only get the same or better incentive amount. It is possible that the savings could go down. If it does go down significantly please let us know.
If you’re working in a program where incentives are calculated based on modeled savings, program administrators have been alerted to this change and will do their best to accommodate any issues that may arise. We have performed a snapshot of all jobs before the switch, so that we can do fair comparisons if we need to review any special circumstances.
As some of you know, we’ve been working really hard on a lot of new features and fixes for Snugg Pro. This is one relatively small set of those changes but since it affected modeling and it was fairly independent of the other changes, we wanted to get it out now so that users can benefit from it immediately.
For the bigger release, we’ll give you a preview of the changes before we launch. We’ll send that out through email and through chat support in the app. Look for it soon!
Please don’t hesitate to reach out to our support system through chat or via email at pro@snugghome.com if you have any questions.