A year ago this week, a star was born. Working with IBPSA-USA, the US chapter of the International Building Performance Simulation Association, and Big Ladder Software, a Denver, CO startup, the Energy Department launched Unmet Hours, a peer-to-peer question-and-answer site for the building energy modeling community.

Unmet Hours is the brainchild of Neal Kruis from Big Ladder Software, who was inspired by Stack Overflow, the popular question-and-answer site for programmers. The name Unmet Hours references a popular building energy modeling diagnostic—the number of hours in a year during which a building’s HVAC system cannot keep it within prescribed temperature and humidity setpoints.

As with Stack Overflow, an anonymous user can search the growing Unmet Hours knowledge base for answers to previously asked questions.  With an account, a user can answer existing questions or ask new ones, leave comments, and vote on questions and answers of other users. Given sufficient “karma” points—one accrues karma points when other users vote his or her questions or answers up—a user can even retag and edit questions and answers, effectively helping to organize and police the site. The site has easy-to-use sort and filter features that allow users to locate relevant questions. A tagging feature allows a user to subscribe to interesting topics and receive email notifications—either immediately, daily, or weekly—whenever new questions or answers about those topics are posted.

"Unmet Hours makes it easy to ask questions and fun to answer them! Posting a question is less daunting to new users because their questions are emailed directly to the users who are eager to help, and not to all 800+ users. Experts have incentive to volunteer answers as they compete for a higher karma ranking on the site. It's a win-win for everyone!” says Kruis.

One year in, Unmet Hours has far exceeded DOE’s initial expectations. Over 100 new questions are posted every month and most are answered within a few hours, keeping the number of unmet question hours low—ha! Unmet Hours has become the first line of support for both EnergyPlus and OpenStudio, and members of both development teams are among the most active contributors. More recently, the Radiance community has started using the service as well. Unmet Hours welcomes questions about any energy simulation tool—be sure to tag the question with the name of the tool—and even general questions about modeling practice or the modeling community.

“People are getting really involved,” Kruis adds. “With the amount of time some of them spend answering questions on the site it's hard to imagine they're getting any actual modeling work done!"