The state of Washington recently wrapped up a lengthy residential energy code update process. The new energy code, Washington State Energy Code 2021, has many updates that will, over time, give builders more code compliance options and better align the code compliance process with valuable Federal Energy Efficient Construction Tax Credits.

Ekotrope released in-app Scenario Modeling to HERS Raters in July of 2022. Since then, there have been thousands of design changes analyzed over thousands of energy models to provide builders with answers to their time-sensitive design decisions.

This blog will review all 25,000 combinations analyzed using Scenario Modeling on 5,000 unique house plans since July 2022.

ChatGPT, a tool developed by OpenAI, is a powerful artificial intelligence software tool that can generate believable, well-written text responses to any prompt imaginable in almost any language. Having explored and experimented with ChatGPT, I want to share my experience and thoughts on how it could be used in the HERS Rater workflow, and how it may disrupt some aspects of our business.

Have you ever been curious about how other rating organizations are getting their builder’s homes to pass updated codes like IECC 2021? With codes constantly changing and standards becoming increasingly difficult to achieve, we thought it would be interesting to take a look at how one of our own clients approached this challenge. We’re diving into one of our client’s Scenario Modeling projects to understand their approach, see which scenarios they analyzed, and review the results. 

Raters are often tasked how to earn more tax credits without making making major changes to the builder’s spec. We asked one ‘what-if’ design change question to see what one change could do for all homes built in 2021. We ran the numbers and found an opportunity to earn builders across the country $65M in incentives.

Ekotrope’s 2021 Year-in-Review is here! With over 240,000 homes rates in Ekotrope RATER over the course of 2021, we have some pretty expansive insights on trends in HERS rated homes. Read on to find out which states had the highest number of HERS Ratings, which had the best HERS performance, which had the best 45L performance, and what the trending specs are for homes.

While Ekotrope has aimed to streamline every step of home energy modeling, there remains one headache for our users - piecing together all of the software tools that you use to have one simple, seamless rater workflow. We’re introducing Inspection Sync - a major new innovation to seamlessly integrate your inspection software with Ekotrope RATER. Read more to learn about the types and characteristics of high-quality software as well as common workflows that can be optimized with Inspection Sync, Ekotrope RATER, and other off-the-shelf software. 

In this blog, David Pedrick (former HER and QAD) outlines the 5 best places to look for energy efficiency improvements in your home. For raters, we want this article to act as a sort of set of quick tips you can share with friends, family, and neighbors who are trying to make energy efficient improvements to their homes.

Our partnerships coupled with our RATER software insights have allowed us to better understand certain practices used across the HERS Rating Market. These innovative techniques have developed across multiple HERS Rating companies and are now quite common. David Pedrick, a former QAD and 3rd Party QA Provider Manager himself, offers his expert insight on how to implement these best practices in your business.