Climate Consultant 4.0 Develops Design Guidelines for Each Unique Climate Murray Milne, Robin Liggett, Andrew Benson, and Yasmin Bhattacharya UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design milne@ucla.edu ABSTRACT: Energy efficient design requires different types of buildings in each different climate. This makes it essential for architects, builders, contractors, and homeowners to understand the resources of their unique local climate and how it influences the performance of their buildings. Climate Consultant 4.0 has been created to achieve this. It adds a number of new features, including new graphic screens and an interactive tutorial to explain the psychrometric chart. It also automatically creates a list of Design Guidelines based on the attributes of each unique climate and it then displays a sketch illustrating how each Guideline applies. Thus, Climate Consultant 4.0 helps people who are designing, constructing, and maintaining buildings anywhere in the world understand the resources of their local climate and how it impacts their building’s performance. 1.0 INTRODUCTION: Buildings use over 40% of this nation’s energy and produce a comparable amount of greenhouse gasses. About half of this energy is used in residential buildings, of which most is used for space heating and cooling. The energy consumption of the vast majority of these “envelope dominated” buildings is determined by how well they respond to the local climate. Climate Consultant 4.0 is intended to support this vast constituency of small energy consumers who design, build, own, and maintain this huge stock of envelope- dominated buildings. The purpose is not simply to plot climate data, but rather to organize and represent this information in easy-to-understand ways that show the subtle attributes of the climate, and its impact on built form. The goal is to help users create more energy efficient, more sustainable buildings, each of which is uniquely suited to its particular spot on this planet. 2.0 CONTENT OF THE NEW CLIMATE CONSULTANT 4.0: Climate Consultant 4.0 uses the annual 8760 hour EPW format climate data that is made available at no cost by the Department of Energy for thousands of stations around the world (available through a link on our web site). Climate Consultant 4.0 translates this raw climate data into dozens of meaningful graphic displays. Only a few of the more advanced features are described here. 2.1 Psychrometric Chart: On the psychrometric chart each dot represents the temperature and humidity of each of the 8760 hours per year (Fig.1). Different Design Strategies are represented by specific zones on this chart. The percentage of hours that fall into each of the 14 different Design Strategy Zones gives a relative idea of the most effective passive heating or passive cooling