Question-and-Answer Resource for the Building Energy Modeling Community
 | 1 | initial version |
We use EnergyPlus in its raw idf / text editor form in commercial practice. Over the years we have developed spreadsheet inputs which help take a lot of the mundane data entry work away from us and it speeds us up no end. We use sketchup/open studio legacy to build the geometric model after that we don't really see the need for a GUI interface, being engineers we love excel and use that to sort our data inputs and then originally we put everything in manually but now as I said we automate it using super simple excel coding (looking to improve on this next year). The only difficulty is understanding EnergyPlus logic, but once you have that figured that out it really doesn't seem to matter to me whether you have a GUI or not.
Oh we do heavily rely on the ESO viewer to help us analyse and trouble shoot our model we would actually be completely lost without that.
