LoopLink Update

By, Doug Carruthers

Just when you thought LoopLink couldn't get any better... it does.

Formation Properties Estimators

Regardless of the type of ground heat exchanger design you are working on, you have to provide some information about the thermal properties of the ground. For many users, selecting a representative formation thermal conductivity and/or formation thermal diffusivity has been a stumbling block. The tables can be a little intimidating (especially for horizontal trench) and soil/rock is just something many people don’t know that much about.

In our latest update, we added tools to help estimate the thermal properties of the ground customized to the needs of the type of ground heat exchanger you are designing.

Vertically & Horizontally Bored

In vertically or horizontally bored GHEX, the formation thermal properties are a weighted average of each layer of soil/rock through which the bore passes. You can now create a drill log for either of these types of systems and LoopLink will automatically calculate and report the estimated thermal properties of the formation.

The drill log you define can also be saved and included as part of your printed reports.

Horizontally Trenched

There is a lot going on in the soil table for horizontally trenched ghex and it is intimidating especially for the uninitiated. So, we took some time and thought about how the table is read by a person and created an interactive tool to guide you through the selection process.

Now you just need to specify, the density and moisture range for your formation as well as the basic composition of the soil by percentage of sand, silt, and clay. LoopLink will narrow down your options and make suggestions for the closest 1-3 soils from the table.

Once you make your selection, click ‘Apply Estimated Soil Properties’ and the thermal conductivity and diffusivity will be updated for your design.

It is important to note that these new tools are just providing estimates. Even with a drill log defined, you can still directly set your thermal properties. Which you should do if you have actual formation thermal conductivity test results.

Video Help

Help files are awesome but sometimes we don’t feel like reading either so, we started making help videos. We don’t have them for every section just yet but you will notice a new play button popping up next to the help link in the sections where videos are available.

These are made more for first timers than our old pros but if you get stuck, they can give you a nudge in the right direction. Like everything else in a well maintained system, these are a work in progress and we will continue to add new content and improve over time.

Log In From Any LoopLink Domain

This new feature is something that users of our manufacturer versions will appreciate most. Have you ever Googled ‘LoopLink’, gone to looplinkrlc.com and been told that your log in information is invalid but you KNOW it is right?

Often times, your log in information is correct but, you are on the wrong website. This happens a lot more often than we thought it would when we started building the manufacturer versions so we changed our approach to logging in a little bit.

Now, if you are using good information on the wrong site, we will provide you with a link to the correct site. For a bunch of reasons that are too boring to detail, we don’t log you in automatically but, we now direct you to where you need to be to log in to your account.

Bug Fixes

We do a lot of testing and try to be careful before any release but sometimes it takes pushing our work into the wild to find problems. There were a couple of noteworthy bug fixes that we completed in this release.

• You may now include special characters like é,ô,à,ü,° in the text fields of LoopLink without crashing the report system. We unfortunately can’t support all character encodings. LoopLink will do its best to include these characters in your reports but if the character cannot be reproduced, it will be skipped and your report will still be generated.
• Our explorations into character encodings made it possible for us to switch units of ft^2 in reports to the much cleaner looking ft²… not really an error but it was something that bugged our report designer.
• The ‘% Energy From Geo’ calculation has been corrected for systems that use non-electric supplemental or dual fuel technologies. This issue had no impact on design calculations so critical values like bore lengths, operating costs etc. were unaffected by the error and the subsequent correction.

LoopLink/Firefox 19.0 PDF Issue

By, Doug Carruthers

In the latest release of the popular Firefox web browser, Mozilla introduced a new method of handling PDF files. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to play nice with LoopLink project summaries.

If you use Firefox and you are having trouble saving your Project Summaries, try the following steps to correct the issue (we are assuming you have some form of Adobe Acrobat or Acrobat Reader installed):

1. Open Firefox and click on Tools > Options
2. Click on the Applications icon.
3. In the search bar type 'pdf'. In the window below you should be presented with Content Type 'Portable Document Format (PDF)'
4. In the Action drop down on the right, select 'Use Adobe Acrobat (in Firefox)'.
5. Click 'OK'

This issue was brought to our attention by a user working in Firefox 19.0 on a Windows Vista machine. We were able to recreate the problem on Windows XP and Windows 7 with the same version of Firefox.

Update

This issue is not isolated to LoopLink Project Summaries. We have heard reports from users that other PDF files are also subject to this Firefox bug.

LoopLink Minor Update

By, Doug Carruthers

We rolled out a couple of small fixes to LoopLink this morning. Most of the work was done to simplify the back-end process of account creation and renewals so for the most part, you should never notice the change.

One change you may notice is that we flipped the 30 Year Cost of Ownership table so that it matches the rest of the page. GSHP is now on the right just like it is every where else on the page. This should be a little more intuitive but it might throw you off the first time you see it if you use the 30 Year table when presenting to customers (we flipped the report page too.)

Other than that, there isn't much to report. Let us know if you find anything that needs attention or if you have any thing that you want us to add.

LoopLink Update (minor)

By, Doug Carruthers

We have been on a massive bug squishing bender for the past couple of weeks and we are rolling out the results later on today (5/16/2012) at around 4pm CST. The whole process should be an unnoticeable blip for most, but some times these events walk us into unexpected problems so we are telling everyone to prepare for interruptions until 5pm CST.

Squished Bugs

• MasterCard payments now process correctly (...priceless)
• Zone Pie Chart now filters unused slices so if you have no dual fuel costs, there is no dual fuel slice.
• It used to be that a user could get around setting some of the information LoopLink needs in order to run an analysis. For example, you could add a zone before setting any energy prices... this was bad. We fixed it.
• Duplicate projects will copy pricing information from the original.
• You can't have a sensible heat factor of 0... that wouldn't be sensible.
• Load estimator now works for up to 10,000sqft spaces. (Still only an estimating tool though. Nothing replaces proper load calcs.)
  
• We found a couple of typos... in this day and age of spellcheckers too. It was totally inappropriate we know. If you fin d an mispellin ni LoopLink, let use now and we'll send you a rward.


• Sensible Capacity is no longer shown for water to water equipment on screen or in reports. (We couldn't believe it took us this long to notice this one.)

We have a bunch of other little tiny things that we worked out too. Most of which weren't problems but rough edges that got a little smoothing. We meant what we said about rewards too... if you are the first one to catch a problem in LoopLink and you let us know about it by phone (866-995-4449) or through our comments form we will reward you for your efforts.

The Whitepage of Indecision

Recently we had a user run into an issue where they were unable to print their project summary from LoopLink. They could log-in and get to the project summary page but when they hit print... all they got in return was a blank white page staring back at them like the abominable snowman in a blizzard.

So what was going on? We are not entirely sure why this happened but it appears that the issue was caused by a glitch in either the Acrobat Reader Plug-In or Internet Explorer 9 on the user's computer. Sometimes these things happen. If it happens to you, there are a couple of different things to try to fix the problem.

Check for Updates.

• Internet Explorer doesn't have a quick "update me" button to point you to in the browser so we are going to suggest a quick Google-ing (or Bing-ing for our Microsoft loyalists) of IE Updates.
• To update your Acrobat Reader Plugin go to http://get.adobe.com/reader/ and follow the instructions.

Try a new browser

• Firefox or Google Chrome.
• It seems like they should all just work but not all browsers are created equally. We do always say that for best results LoopLink should be viewed using Firefox (Chrome works just as well. It just doesn't seem to be as popular.)

IE9 is showing some promise as far as predictability of page formatting so if it is working for you, great! If not, give these ideas a try and always remember: rebooting sometimes fixes the darndest things. Let us know if this doesn't work and we will help you through to the other side.

Technical Difficulties

By, Doug Carruthers

We are experiencing technical difficulties with our primary webserver for Geo-Connections Inc. In the recent months we have seen an huge increase in site traffic and it appears we have hit a point in our life that we need to upgrade our back end.

LoopLink has had only one reported interruption but even one is too many for our liking. We are currently working on moving our website to new digs and should have the process completed by early next week.

To Access LoopLink without connecting to the Geo-Connections site please go to: looplinkrlc.com.

Thank you for your patience and understanding during this transition. We will have things operating like normal again soon. We will keep you posted.