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University of Idaho · Integrated Design Lab
DESIGN TOOLS
Removing the time barrier from better building design
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Tools Update · Summer 2026 · SOLIS · HELIOS · LUMEN · CODEX
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This edition sponsored by
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Four tools, one idea.
This spring, Dylan has leveraged the power of AI to build a small family of browser-based design tools. Each one targets a recurring time barrier — the kind of slow, repetitive work that quietly stands between a design team and a better-performing building. Remove the barrier and the right analysis happens early, when it still costs relatively little to change the design.
These tools are all free, self-contained, and built to keep working: no installs, no logins, no plug-ins, and the math runs right in your browser whether you are on your phone in the field or sitting at your desk.
Four are ready to share. Here’s what each one does:
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| SOLIS — K–12 lighting-retrofit audit tool for Idaho Power cohort participants, which translates field data into a verification report (available on request). |
| HELIOS — commercial lighting compliance under IECC 2018 C405, start to finish. |
| LUMEN — an interactive daylighting studio: drag a slider, watch the room change. |
| CODEX — a full suite of climate-analysis tools for the schematic stage. |
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Idaho Power Commercial · K–12 Schools · Lighting Retrofit
SOLIS
School Optimization of Lighting, Incentives & Savings
Field data in. Verification report out.
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A self-contained, field-to-report audit tool for K–12 lighting retrofits under Idaho Power’s Commercial incentive programs. Survey the existing system room by room, model the LED retrofit, compare every incentive path, and generate the verification report — entirely in the browser, online or off.
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Compares all six mutually-exclusive retrofit incentive paths and recommends the highest-value eligible one. |
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Schedule 9 cost modeling, an IECC 2018 lighting-power-density check, and live ROI / simple payback. |
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Print-ready cover, full audit, and project-summary reports — validated to the penny against the source workbook. |
Available upon request
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IECC 2018 · Section C405 · Idaho-Adopted
HELIOS
High-Efficiency Lighting & IECC Optimization System
Commercial lighting compliance, start to finish.
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A guided five-tool workflow for commercial lighting compliance under IECC 2018 Section C405. Establish the interior lighting power allowance at the earliest design stage, map the daylight zones, verify the fenestration envelope, then run the final interior and exterior compliance checks — in sequence.
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The Design-Phase Lighting Advisor sets the power-allowance budget before you contract fixtures. |
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The Daylight Area Calculator identifies the sidelit and toplit zones that need daylight-responsive controls (C405.2.3). |
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Interior (C405.3 / .2) and exterior (C405.4) compliance checks close out the design. |
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Daylight Factor · UDI · IES LM-83
LUMEN
Lighting, Useful-daylight & Multipliers Education Navigator
Drag a slider. Watch the room change.
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An interactive daylighting studio built on one idea — a daylit room is one equation and one picture. Move any input (window size, glazing VLT, room depth, finishes, sky type) and watch the daylight factor, illuminance, and comfort bands update live across section, plan, elevation, and 3D views.
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Daylight factor for a single room and for a whole floor plate, with sundial & shadow studies. |
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Shading & light shelves, toplighting, and seasonal daylight-zone analysis. |
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Glazing trade-offs (VLT / SHGC / LSG) and annual climate-based metrics. |
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Brown & DeKay · Sun, Wind & Light · 3rd Ed.
CODEX
Climate-Oriented Design Explorer
Graphic climate analysis, restored as a design tool.
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A full suite of browser-based climate-analysis and design tools rooted in Brown & DeKay’s Sun, Wind & Light. These graphic methods of early-design climate analysis were abandoned not because they were inaccurate, but because they were too slow to draw by hand. CODEX brings them back as fast, schematic-phase tools — validated against the book’s companion spreadsheets.
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One weather file, the whole picture
The suite is built to flow. Start with a single EnergyPlus weather file — one of 21 Idaho cities, or your own — and every tool reads from the same source. From there the work moves through three stages:
| 1 · Read the climate — characterize sun, wind, light, and comfort for the site. |
| 2 · Put numbers on it — turn climate into loads, balance points, and passive-strategy potential. |
| 3 · Make it shareable — assemble the findings into a branded report for the design review. |
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Phase 1 · Twelve tools
Read the climate
| Weather Data Parser — loads any EPW file and summarizes the full year: temperature, humidity, wind, solar radiation, and sky cover. The foundation every other tool draws from. |
| Sun Path Diagram — stereographic sun paths for your latitude across the whole year, with altitude and azimuth on demand. Drives orientation, glazing, and shading. |
| Solar Radiation Analysis — how much direct, diffuse, and total solar energy lands on each face of the building by orientation and tilt. |
| Wind Rose — the classic petal diagram of how often wind comes from each direction and at what speed. Find prevailing winds for ventilation and windbreaks. |
| Wind Square — pairs wind with temperature and season so you can tell when wind is a resource to admit and when it’s a force to block. |
| Bioclimatic Chart — plots the year’s hours on a Givoni–Milne comfort chart and shows which passive strategies extend comfort, and by how much. |
| Shading Calendar — maps exactly when shading is needed across the year, defining the overheated period a shading device has to cover. |
| Daylight Availability — how much daylight the site receives through the year, to size and place glazing for daylighting. |
| Sky Cover — clear-versus-overcast patterns by month and hour, the backdrop for both daylighting and solar strategies. |
| Sundial Shadow Simulator — cast shadows for any date and time to study how the building and its neighbors shade one another. |
| Daylight Obstructions — account for surrounding buildings and terrain that block sky and sun from the site. |
| Climate Carpet — the whole year as a single hour-by-day heatmap, so seasonal and daily patterns jump out at a glance. |
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Phase 2 · Quantitative analysis
Put numbers on it
Once the climate is understood, Phase 2 turns it into the numbers that drive schematic decisions — loads, balance points, and the real potential of each passive strategy.
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Integrated Energy Analysis
Ten interlinked modules that hand results from one to the next, so a single set of building inputs carries all the way through:
Heat Gain → Balance Point → Cross Ventilation → Stack Ventilation → Night Ventilation → Passive Solar → Earth Tube → Annual Energy → EUI & Carbon → Net-Zero / PV Sizing
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Spotlight
CBECS Loads Dashboard
Internal loads — the heat thrown off by lights, people, and plug-in equipment — are one of the biggest sources of guesswork in an early energy estimate, and one of the easiest to get wrong. This dashboard swaps the guess for real numbers: benchmark lighting, equipment, and plug loads drawn from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS), organized by building activity type — and filterable by region and climate so the figures fit your project rather than the national average.
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Pick a building type — office, school, retail, healthcare, lodging, and more — and read its typical internal loads and energy-use intensity at a glance. |
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Narrow the data by Census region and climate zone, so you’re comparing against buildings in conditions like yours — not a flat national figure. |
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Feed those benchmarks straight into the Heat Gain and Balance Point steps, so passive-strategy sizing rests on measured data instead of assumptions. |
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Sanity-check your own numbers against how comparable buildings actually perform — a fast reality check before you ever open a simulation. |
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Featured · Sponsored by Idaho Power
The Idaho Power Climate filter scopes every benchmark to Idaho Power’s service territory in a single click — the climate most of our users actually build in — so the loads you start from already reflect home ground. The CBECS series is sponsored by Idaho Power.
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Also updated · Six tools
IDL workhorses, modernized
Several long-trusted IDL spreadsheets, rebuilt as the same kind of fast, self-contained web tools — same calculations you rely on, now a click away on any device. The original workbooks haven’t gone anywhere, either: each tool’s homepage still offers the legacy spreadsheet for download.
| Construction Insulation Value Calculator — build up an assembly layer by layer and get its R-value and U-value. |
| Infiltration Rate Converter — move cleanly between air-change rates, CFM50, and the other ways infiltration gets reported. |
| TEST — Thermal Energy Savings Tabulator — tally the energy savings of envelope and efficiency measures side by side. |
| EnergyPlus Fan Energy Calculator — size fan power and energy against code requirements. |
| Weather Normalization — normalize measured energy use to weather so year-over-year comparisons are fair. |
| Meter Data Analysis — turn raw utility and interval-meter data into patterns you can actually read. |
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New this release
The CODEX Report Builder
The newest addition closes the loop. Run your analyses across the suite, capture a graphic snapshot from any tool, and the Report Builder assembles them into a single, branded, multi-page PDF.
Drop in callout cards to highlight key findings, and it generates an Executive Summary and a set of Architectural Design Directives — a presentation-ready document that carries your climate findings straight into a schematic-design review.
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What ties them all together
| ✓ Free and open — every tool runs entirely in your browser, on any device. |
| ✓ Self-contained — no external libraries, no tracking; the math runs locally, online or off. |
| ✓ Grounded, not black-boxed — methods come from published sources, codes, and Brown & DeKay. |
| ✓ Built to outlast — each one made to keep working long after the project that funded it. |
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Whether you teach, design, run simulations, or just want to understand a building before committing to form, there’s a tool here for you — students, practicing architects and engineers, and the building-simulation community alike.
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A farewell from Dylan Agnes
After eleven years
My position with the University of Idaho Integrated Design Lab is ending on July 20th. Rather than let the work slip out quietly, here’s one last edition — a swan song for a body of work I’m genuinely proud of, and a proper thank-you for the years.
In that time: daylighting and electric-lighting research, energy audits, building the Energy Resource Library into something people actually use, lecturing, running our Lunch & Learn series, wrangling contracts and grants — and a fair amount of 3D printing along the way. The IDL gave me a career, and a community of people who care about better buildings and a lower-carbon future. I’m grateful for every year of it.
— Dylan of House Agnes, the First of His Name,
Eleven-Year Warden of the Integrated Design Lab, Forger of SOLIS and Namer of the Sun, Keeper of the Star-Marked Portfolio, Auditor of Phantom Loads and Hunter of Wasted Energies, Bringer of Daylight to Darkened Halls, Commander of Ten Thousand Luminaires, He Who Crossed from the Eighth Realm to the Eleventh and Lived, Twice-Seated Chair of the Technology Transfer, the Unmotored, who goes on his own two feet.
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University of Idaho Integrated Design Lab
The Water Center, 322 East Front Street, Boise, ID 83702
CODEX methodology: Brown & DeKay, Sun, Wind & Light: Architectural Design Strategies (3rd ed.). All calculations run in your browser — no external dependencies.
This edition is sponsored by Idaho Power.
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