Question-and-Answer Resource for the Building Energy Modeling Community
 | 1 | initial version |
If your building is connected to a central hot water plant that serves other buildings as well, then the best EnergyPlus option is the District Heating object. This allows you to set a flow rate and capacity of heating associated with the central hot water plant, so you will need to update the Environmental Impact Factors object to set the district heating efficiency (default value is 0.3 without the Environmental Impact Factors object).
Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that the latest EnergyPlus version 9.3 has an HVAC Template object to create a hot water plant with the building's heating components on the demand side and this District Heating object on the supply side -- there are only HVAC Template objects to create a hot water plant with a boiler on the supply side. If you are using the HVAC Template objects because you are altering the EnergyPlus input data file (IDF) manually, then you can use the boiler HVAC Template object to create the loop as a first step. When you simulate that IDF, EnergyPlus creates an expanded IDF (EXPIDF) containing all of the individual objects generated from the HVAC Template. As a second step, you can then replace the boiler with district heating in the EXPIDF. You can use any EnergyPlus example file with district heating as a resource if you have issues.
This process of replacing a boiler with district heating in a hot water plant would be much easier in an interface for EnergyPlus (DesignBuilder, OpenStudio, etc.) that has an HVAC diagram to visualize the connections between components.
