We prepared these lecture slides to help you get the quickest start with Zebra OC. The slides are available here.

This document hosts ZEBRA’s internal documentation, which is then loaded into the spreadsheet automatically as the purple areas. We have placed all the commentary in a single document in part because some readers may find it easier than reading it within Excel, but also because it is easier for us to edit in Word than in Excel. At the end of the document you will find some notes for these needing to edit this document. You can download it here.

Research paper that discusses the accuracy of the Zebra model, and compares it with more advanced modelling technologies. The paper is available here.

We have made some notes for users who are running Zebra side by side with dynamic simulations to compare the outputs. The notes are available here

We have written a guide on the best approach to take to iterate your designs for carbon and energy performance. This includes information on how to interpret the model and identify areas for improvement. It is available here.

We have written some thoughts on things students may wish to consider when designing buildings to be efficient in terms of carbon and energy. You get get the notes here

This essay explains the concept of energy and power in low energy building design. It is available here.

The heating and cooling demand bar charts are in important part of the Zebra model, but they require some understanding of how the model works to interpret them effectively. We have written a guide on this which is available here.

The definition of windows is one or the more complicated aspects of the Zebra model. You can download guidance on defining windows here.

The Zebra model contains a built-in database of weather stations. However, sometimes you may have access to an EPW weather file that represents the weather at your project location better that the stations in the database. You can use this Excel-based tool to convert the hourly data in the EPW file into monthly directional averages required in the Zebra model. Download the tool here

Choosing your heating and cooling setpoints is an important decision with energy modelling. We have written a guide on this in relation to Zebra, including a discussion of Adaptive Thermal Conform levels. The guide is available here. The spreadsheet to calculate Adaptive Thermal Comfort Levels which is mentioned in this guide is available here.

This note is about how to account for changes to the heating and cooling of a building brought by sheltering structures, e.g. conservatories, external staircases (circulation space), via introduction of a temperature reduction factor. This note is available here.

A primer on embodied carbon in buildings, describing the background to EC in building, mitigation strategies to reduce it, and how to calculate upfront EC in Zebra OC. This document is not a manual for Zebra EC. The primer is available here.

An example of Zebra being used to design an office building. Download the tutorial for this example here and the Zebra spreadsheet which was used here.

We have written a guide on the heating and cooling balance of the buildings, covering the measuring units, key parameters and basic design principles. The guide is available here. The models used for calculation are available here.

We have written an introduction to the concept of form factor and its relationship with heat loss of a building. This introduction is available here.

We prepared slides for a tutorial held in India showing how to model a hotel building using ZEBRA. The slides are available here.

We have some videos describing the background to the development of Zebra-OC. You can view these here.

We have created detailed tutorial videos for each part of Zebra-OC, covering all the major inputs and outputs. You can watch these videos here.

Zebra-EC contains a database of common construction materials and products. For many early-stage calculations, or to look at the gross impact of design choices, this database might well be enough. However, once you have a particular product in mind from a known manufacturer, better estimates of the embodied carbon (EC) can be calculated by using the Environment Product Declaration (EPD) from the manufacturer. This manual presents the procedure of importing indicators from EPD into the ZEBRA EC database. This manual is available here.

A primer on embodied carbon in buildings, describing the background to EC in building, mitigation strategies to reduce it. This primer is available here.

We have written a tutorial on how to get started with Zebra OC online, using a large commercial building as an example. This tutorial is available here