Computing Power Needed for Rescheck, Manual J, Manual S, Manual D

Today on the Reschexpert blog, Rescheck Podcast, Rescheck User Forum, Rescheck Directory and user base of https://www.rescheck.info our plan is to discuss what type of computing power you are going to need to create four reports.  These reports are as follows:

• Rescheck
• Manual J Heat Loss
• Manual S Equipment Sizing
• Manual D Duct Sizing

The ability to compute calculations these days can be done a number of different devices.  We want to initially look at 4 different types of devices and consider why you may or may not want to use each device when generating your Reschecks, Manual Ds, Manual Ss, and Manual J Heat Loss.

Smart Phones

The first device you can use to generate a home energy report is the one that is probably already attached to your hand 18 hours out of the day.  The beauty of technology today is that everyone has access to a super computer in their pocket, at all times, meaning you could generate an energy report anywhere.  The ease of use stops with that, as I have always felt like a cell phone is great for handling small tasks and basic back office workloads.  However, when it comes to the intensity of math involved in calculating Reschecks, Manual S, Manual J, and Manual D you will quickly burn out of using your cell phone to do even one energy audit.  Probably the most usable functions on cell phone for conducting an energy audit are the camera for taking pictures of plans and specs, the flashlight for illuminating blueprints hot off the printing press, and the calculator to give you a hand in all the math you will be doing.  

Tablets and Pads

The next item you can use is a tablet or iPad.  They have made great strides in recent years with larger touch centric screens and detachable keyboards.  However, I group most tablets in the same group as a cell phone when it comes to generating home energy audits and actually using them.  These tablets are great to hand to your kid in the back of your SUV to watch an animated movie for the 15th time, but the amount of work you can actually complete on them without feeling like you are doing digital cartwheels is limiting.  Tablets do have their place in the Rescheck, Manual J, Manual D, and Manual S creation offices around the world.  They are great for presenting electronic data to clients and showing them different scenarios during face to face home energy discussions.  Also in a pinch you can use the touch screen and detachable keyboard to create a quality report.  Just be sure to allot plenty of time.

Laptops

Another item that is commonly used is a laptop.  The key to a good laptop is that you want speed.  You need to keep multiple plans printing on the blueprint plotter, 6-10 Google Chrome tabs open and running, along with spreadsheets, PDF readers, and back office sales technologies so that your whole home energy audit office can tick.  This means you are going to want at least 16gb of ram.  The area where I typically choose to go with a less is more type of attitude, is on actual gigabytes of hard drive in the laptop.  I am a heavy user of Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive, and I utilize every bit of cloud data that I can find to keep backups and keep clutter from accumulating on my actual hard drives.  The final bit of advice is that if you are going to use a laptop for any amount of time to generate home energy audits you need to get a very large screen.  I am talking the laptop that your wife, girlfriend, husband, or boyfriend would laugh at when you use in public.  The reasoning is that the numbers on blueprints can be microscopic, get the bigger screen, trust me.  Finally battery life is also important.  Nothing worse then having a laptop and being tethered to the wall because it looses charge after 15 minutes.  If your battery is toast it is probably time to upgrade your laptop to something better suited to create Reschecks, Manual S, Manual J, and Manual D anyways.

Desktops

The final item is the most comfortable setup for creating Rescheck, Manual J, Manual S, and Manual D.  This is a dual screen desktop unit.  With this type of rig you can have two screens showing you home energy audit information simultaneously.  When choosing a monitor for this setup you will want to go with 19″ or larger so that smaller numbers on a screen can be easier to see.  Also it allows you to open more windows side by side so you could almost run a separate program for web browsing, calculations, manual j, manual s, manual d, and Rescheck desktop or Rescheck Web without having to minimize or miss anything on your computer screen.  As far as the hard drive goes you can opt for the smaller one and take advantage of the tech savvy cloud providers that will dump free gigabytes upon you just for giving them a try.  Again, on this  setup you need to choose 16gb of Ram or more.  The more ram, the better, in the instance of creating home energy audits, because you never know when someone will send you plans taken with a Iphone camera in full HD at about 20mb each and 40 pages long.  You don’t want to spend all night loading images or plans and sending them to your plotter, so go with more Ram and a smaller hard drive.  Then add 2 monitors and you should be ready to create Reschecks, Manual J, Manual D, and Manual S.

Conclusion

Overall, if you are using Rescheck Web or Rescheck Desktop to generate Rescheck reports or maybe a software like Wrightsoft or Coolcalc to generate your Manual J, Manual S, and Manual D you are going to need a good machine to be your sidekick.  We hope you enjoyed our synopsis and in depth technical detail of the computing power needed to create your Rescheck, Manual J, Manual D, and Manual S.  If you need these reports created for you simply email us your plans to service@rescheck.info and click buy now.