ERV Selection Software — Sizing Energy Recovery the Way the Code Now Demands

Five years ago, Energy Recovery Ventilators were a checkbox on green-rated projects. Today, ASHRAE 90.1 and most regional codes mandate them across a wide swath of commercial buildings — which means every ventilation engineer needs an answer to "what ERV did you select, and why."

What ERV selection actually entails

ERV sizing is a multi-physics problem that catalog-table selection cannot solve cleanly:

• Effectiveness across operating conditions. Sensible, latent, and total effectiveness vary with airflow, temperature delta, and humidity. The summer-design number you quote is not the winter or shoulder-season reality.
• Pressure drop on both sides. ERV pressure drop hits both supply and exhaust fans — meaning the wrong selection moves the load somewhere it doesn't belong.
• Frost control and cross-leakage for cold climates and contamination-sensitive environments (healthcare, labs).
• Bypass strategy so you're not recovering heat when free cooling is available.

A real ERV Selection Software handles all four against certified curves, for both wheel and plate-type units.

How MileSoft handles it

The MileSoft ERV Selection tool sits on the same engineering spine as our AHU, FCU, and Chiller selections. Three things matter most:

1. Multi-condition modeling. You select for design-day, but the tool also reports recovery effectiveness across the full annual bin profile.
2. Plate vs wheel comparison. Side-by-side TCO comparison for the same project so you can defend the choice to a discerning consultant.
3. Integration with the broader HVAC tool chain. When the AHU sizing changes, the ERV revisits its selection automatically — no more orphaned components.

The capabilities that matter most

• Annual energy modeling that produces a single number an architect can put in front of a green-rating consultant.
• Frost-control logic with selectable strategies (face-and-bypass, preheat, modulating) so cold-climate projects don't surprise anyone in February.
• Branded submittal package that's audit-ready out of the box.

Where it fits

The natural pairings:

• AHU Selection Software — the ERV's job is to make the AHU's job smaller.
• Lifecycle Cost Analysis — for the wheel-vs-plate-vs-no-recovery comparison the customer didn't know they needed.

The takeaway

ERV is no longer a niche selection — it's a code-driven, annually-audited piece of every commercial HVAC project you'll touch this decade. Picking from a catalog table means owning the consequences when the actual effectiveness misses the spec sheet.

Book a demo and we'll size the ERV on a real project against your current method. The delta is usually the most expensive number in the conversation.