Question-and-Answer Resource for the Building Energy Modeling Community
 | 1 | initial version |
Hi Rick, to add my own knowledge and experience:
Ladybug Tools as a plugin in Rhino Grasshopper is excellent but only allows you to access about 60-95% of the EnergyPlus and IDF features.
If you want something free to play with, I'd highly recommend Python and other researchers' various libraries and experiments.
Steven Firth his website has examples with Jupyter notebooks manipulating epJSONs (the converted IDF format) to change his buildings and run experiments parametrically with mostly only standard python libraries.
Eppy- python library - maybe comparable to jEPlus, but with fewer advanced features. Excellent for manipulating IDF files and multiple examples in their docs.
Energyplus-wrapper - python library - run multiple IDFs in parallel. I am currently using this and it's great. It does require the following libraries, which I found out the slow and hard way: python-slugify, python-box, joblib
For my MSc thesis, I have made a simple genetic algorithm in python to calibrate my E+ model based on measured electricity use data from the site.
