This manual documents the rules used for modeling residential buildings for performance compliance under California’s 2019 Building Energy Efficiency Standards for Low-Rise Residential Buildings (Energy Standards). This document explains how the proposed design, standard design, and reference design are established for a building and what is reported on the certificate of compliance (CF1R).
The 2019 compliance manager is the simulation and compliance rule implementation software specified by the California Energy Commission. For example, attics, crawl spaces, basements, and attached unconditioned spaces (garages and storage) are defined in the building modeling software.
Documentation of detailed calculation algorithms is contained in the companion volume Appendix G, 2019 Residential Alternative Calculation Method Algorithms.
This reference manual documents the compliance analysis modeling rules for all aspects of the Energy Commission’s ACM Reference Method. This document does not specify the minimum capabilities of vendor-supplied software. The Energy Commission reserves the right to approve vendor software for limited implementations of what is documented in this manual.