b'NATIONAL FENESTRATION RATING COUNCILAbout three months later, Mr. Winford called back with his test results: 0.39, exactly as I had predicted. He was the new apostle of computer models! He wanted ALL of his products simulated, with ALL of his glazing options! This stuff was the greatest invention since sliced bread!But a mystery remained: how did his competitor get 0.33 for the same window? Clearly, it couldnt be the SAME windowyou wouldnt get that much difference just from different assembly methods. The mystery was solved later that year, when we learned that the US Federal Trade Commission had charged a testing agency for lab procedures that werelets call them unorthodox. As a result, all the listings on Seattles Memo 403 were in question. What could be done?It so happened that there was an ASHRAE conference in June of 1989 in Vancouver. Steve Carpenter went to the conference, and arranged a meeting with the head of Seattles Department of Construction and Land Use (the office responsible for Memo 403) and the head of Oregons Department of Energy (who relied on a system similar to Seattles). During lunch at (what is now) the Westin Bayshore, the three conspirators sketched out the basic idea of the NFRC: affordable U-value simulation referenced to testing for each product line, with an independent agency to check that testing and simulation was done in accordance with an accepted standard protocol. The simulation part was easy: the glazed portion of the window would be modelled with either the VISION program (from the Advanced Glazing Laboratory at the FIGURE 2: A YOUNGER VERSION OF THE AUTHOR, APPARENTLY SHOWINGUniversity of Waterloo) or WINDOW (from Lawrence Berkeley Labora-PRINCE CHARLES AND FINANCE MINISTER WILSON HOW TO PLAY AIR GUITAR tory in the U.S.); the opaque part would be modelled with FRAME, by drawing a cross-section of those components using rectangles.Because of this quick and accurate alternative to testing, the little company that could won a national award for innovation in 1991. I attended a gala in Ottawa to honour the award recipients, where I met the Prime Minister, Prince Charles and Lady Diana, and several other luminaries (Figure 2).Meanwhile, window simulation was gaining popularity. Code officials and consumer groups saw the value in getting accurate window perfor-mance numbers, and manufacturers were happy not to have to test every window in their catalogues. Jeff Baker and I toured North America, demonstrating how to rate performance and design better windows using this software. I also taught these techniques to manufacturers in Europe and Israel, but thats worth another story.We provided design values for building design professionals: ever since 1993, the ASHRAE Handbook of Fundamentals has featured a two-page table of window U-values based on FRAME simulations, which was expanded to include curtainwalls, sloped glazing and monumental skylights (Figure 3).I was actually cornered at an ASHRAE conference inDenver in 1993. About a dozen people crowded around me and demanded that FRAME should graduate from its classic rectangles-only interface. Its too crude, they said; it doesnt look professional, they said. Also it should model sloped surfaces to make it more accurate, they said. I said that using rectangles made it really easy for anyone to useespecially window manufacturers (who, at that time, werent as computer-savvy as they are now). I said its been proven many times over to be as accurate as a hot-box testwhich is the gold standard for accuracy, so making it more accurate would serve no purpose, and there would be no way to prove that it was more accurate. I said its developed with public money (EMR, now called Natural Resources Canada, funded the development of the program, which is how we could distribute it for free). Being an engineer, I said it doesnt matter if it looks crude; its accurate, and you dont need pretty pictures on the monitor to help you make better 10 BCBEC ELEMENTSA BCBEC PUBLICATION'