The BEMToolBox Story

I've been an energy modeler for over 15 years now. While a lot has changed during this time, energy modeling hasn’t gotten any easier. Modeling rules and standards are becoming more complex faster than the tools can keep up with. Some people think the solution is simplifying models to generate hundreds of results for a project from a dozen model inputs. While there’s probably a place for simplified energy modeling, my experience is that these tools always fall short somewhere. My approach has always been to use the most capable software tools and methods. This helps to ensure that the models are capable of answering the questions being asked of them - even the complicated ones.

Does this come at a cost? Sure. This added capability requires more time and highly skilled people - both of which increase modeling costs. While we could try to pass all of this along to our clients, we need to remain competitive so energy modeling is accessible to the majority of projects - not just the 1 percent.

How do we do that? We work hard to standardize our modeling workflows, then introduce automation to do the heavy lifting for us. Not only does this speed things up, but it ensures consistent outcomes with less risk of human error.

For most of my career, BEM automation meant spreadsheets, and reporting meant PDF. However, everything changed for us when we started developing Python scripts and applying them to energy modeling tasks. It was an absolute game changer. We’ve replaced those clunky spreadsheets with the Pandas library which finishes crunching 8760 data before your spreadsheet finishes opening. Our PDF reports have become web-based, interactive dashboards that we share by simply sending a link.

Our original objective was to develop better energy model reports that we could share with our clients. However, we quickly realized the greater impact we could have by extending these benefits to other energy modelers, and then by sharing other types of tools we’d been developing.

All of this led to the BEM ToolBox platform, where we can work towards our vision of delivering better reporting of BEM data to the industry.

If you’re interested in what’s to come, subscribe to our YouTube channel and create your free account at BEMToolBox.com to get on our mailing list.

We’d love to hear what you think about the current tools and what you’d like to see next. Post it down in the comments or email us through the site.

Thanks for reading!

-Greg