Hi,
For reference, I am running ResStock v2.2.4, with OpenStudio v2.9.0, which uses EnergyPlus v9.2.0.
I am trying to model 100 buildings that use the same heating and cooling equipment as a baseline building stock to compare various heat pump upgrades to. Specifically, the equipment I have chosen for our analysis is a SEER 15 AC and an 80% AFUE Propane Furnace. Other housing characteristics are determined via the conditional probability distributions tsv files in housing_characteristics.
The location that I am interested in modelling is within custom region (CR) 9. I have chosen one of the 216 TMY3 locations to be Asheville AP. Therefore, the Location.tsv configuration is below:
The Location Region.tsv configuration is below: 
Additionally, because I wish all houses to have propane as their heating method, I have the following configuration in Heating Fuel.tsv to specify 100% probability of having propane as the heating fuel.
I have found that there are two ways to specify all houses have a SEER 15 AC and an 80% AFUE Propane Furnace when running the simulation. I want to determine which one to use in my future simulations.
METHOD 1
The first way is to use the ResStock default versions of HVAC System Heating Propane.tsv and HVAC System Cooling.tsv, which are presented below for CR09, and specify 80% AFUE and SEER 15 AC in Apply Upgrade in the PAT GUI.
HVAC System Heating Propane.tsv ResStock Default:
HVAC System Cooling.tsv ResStock Default:
PAT GUI Apply Upgrade:
Option 1 field contains HVAC System Heating Propane|Propane Furnace, 80% AFUE
Option 2 field contains HVAC System Cooling|AC, SEER 15
METHOD 2
The second way to specify SEER 15 AC and 80% AFUE Propane Furnace is to do so in the HVAC System Heating Propane.tsv and HVAC System Cooling.tsv files.
HVAC System Heating Propane.tsv, 80% AFUE Propane Furnace config:
HVAC System Cooling.tsv, SEER 15 AC config:
Additionally, I would then skip Apply Upgrade in the PAT GUI, because the OpenStudio house models generated would already possess the equipment that I needed.
The purpose of these simulations is to generate a typical housing stock to compare the cost and CO2 benefits to for switching to different types of ASHP and MSHP equipment. Is Method 1 or Method 2 preferable? I wouldn't really expect there to be a difference in the results between the two methods, but that is just an expectation. All things equal, Method 2 is probably preferable because when skipping Apply Upgrade measure, the results.csv file will actually contain the building characteristics of the houses, whereas if Apply Upgrade is "on", the building characteristics will not be there.
