Considerations for IT staffers installing/updating ENERCALC

Last revised: Friday, May 1, 2026 at 09:30 PM

Activation failures

Our software is licensed by concurrent active seats. The minimum license is two seats (the 2nd seat is free, something we started during the pandemic). Anyone with the software can have up to two people in the software at the same time, if they have a 2 seat license. It follows that if you have a 10 seat license, then 10 people can be actively using the software at the same time.

We do not use named users and there is no login to the software. You are welcome to install the software on every engineer's computer in your shop. The licensed server driven activation process will manage the seat situation for you.

Failures in this area occur when firewalls prevent end users from accessing our servers, or when packet inspection is being done and packets are being re-encrypted by the equipment or software doing the packet inspection. This is discussed in further detail below.

In larger shops in particular, it is not unusual for there to be firewalls, packet inspection, various antivirus and anti-malware products, and so on. If these products are used in your shop, they need to allow ENERCALC.exe to connect to our license servers.

License servers: enercalc.net (AWS us-east-1), enercalceast.com (AWS us-east-1), enercalcmidwest.com (AWS us-east-2), enercalcwest.com (AWS us-west-1), enercalcpnw.com (AWS us-west-1). We also have servers in Frankfurt Germany (enercloudeurope.com) and Mumbai, India (enercalcindia.com) for our users closer to those locations.

While these URL are publicly available and open up in a browser, they offer no end user functionality via browser. They are REST API servers using the standard HTTPS 443 port.

You may use the activation server that is closest to your engineer's physical location(s) if you wish. This will reduce latency even though the number of calls to the license server is quite small. Support can provide instructions on how to force use of a particular activation server on a computer-by-computer basis. This is done via a simple Windows registry setting.

WINGET

Our installer is not ready for Winget, although we are working on that and expect to have that resolved by June 1, 2026. In particular, the update installer is probably not going to do what you want if Winget is used, because it is often used when running as SYSTEM. Please see the notes below about running as SYSTEM.

Running the installer in quiet or silent mode

You can run the installer in quiet (or silent) mode using the /Q and /S command line parameters.

Running FULL installer as SYSTEM:

Our new full installer expects to be able to access HKCU and the end user's documents folder. When installing a system, these things aren't available and therefore the install will be incomplete. best solution at the moment is not to run the full installer as system.

Running UPDATE installer as SYSTEM:

There are material properties databases that are updated by the ENERCALC update installer. If the installer runs a system, it cannot read the user's HKCU registry and it cannot access the end user's documents folder, therefore it cannot update these files. These files don't change, generally speaking, more than once a year, but they do change occasionally. running the update installer as system can cause the installer to fail because it can't find the resources, the registry, or the user documents folder.

Workaround: You can run the Update Installer as SYSTEM if you add command line parameter /updatebinariesonly. When you do that, it will update the installed binaries and no other files.

Normally, the update installer determines where ENERCALC binaries are installed based on a registry value created during the full installation process. When running the updater as SYSTEM, this registry value is not available given that SYSTEM cannot access the end user's registry. As SYSTEM, the updater will update using the default install location, C:\program files (x86)\ENERCALC_20.

The update installer will not update the material databases when this command line parameter is used.

Packet inspection

If your shop is doing packet inspection, note that this often results in re-encrypted packets being sent to our server or to the license server client in our app. When this happens, we cannot decrypt the packets, so the connection fails.

This happens in most cases because the tools re-encrypting the packets are re-encrypted with a certificate whose CA root cert we don't have access to. Typically, this is because it belongs to the client's company. Most companies will not be interested in turning off packet inspection on an app-by-app basis, which is understandable.

The usual solution to this is to add the CA root cert to a file in the ENERCALC install folder (C:\program files (x86)\ENERCALC_20\caroot.pem). The CA root certificate can be added to this file by appending it to the end of the file, but it must be in PEM format.

Alternatively, we can also add your CA root certificate to the caroot.pem file in our installation, so that the next time you update, it will always be there. Most companies are not interested in having us add that to our caroot.pem, but we are willing to do so. If that is your choice, you'll need to send us the CA root cert in PEM format.