Evaluation of Emerging Diagnostic Tools for Commercial HVAC Systems

This paper compares and evaluates the capabilities of six emerging diagnostic tools for commercial HVAC systems. We present a brief description of the diagnostic tools, and then focus on evaluating the features of the tools. We include the following six tools in our analysis: Architectural Energy Corporation's ENFORMA® software, Facility Dynamics Engineering's Performance And Continuous Re-commissioning Analysis Tool (PACRAT), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's Whole Building Diagnostician (WBD), Pacific Gas and Electric's Universal Translator, UC Berkeley's Fan System Tools, and Silicon Energy's Enterprise Energy Management Suite. The air-side economizer operation is the most common diagnostic across the tools, so this diagnostic function is evaluated in detail. We outline the key strengths and weaknesses of each tool, while keeping in mind the tool intent and current extent of commercialization. Each tool has unique features for data management and analysis, which can be beneficial for different applications and users.