Considerations for IT staffers installing/updating ENERCALC

Last revised: Monday, June 15, 2026 at 11:35 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 READY!

Our installer is (as of 20.26.06.08 and later builds) ready for Winget.

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. We use Innosetup, so you can use its documentation to see the standard Winget and other command line parameters.

Running the installer as SYSTEM or as a domain admin:

Our full installer expects to be able to access HKCU and the end user's documents folder. When installing as SYSTEM or as a domain ADMIN or similar, these end-user's HKCU and documents folders aren't accessible. The software knows this and will copy the user-specific assets (material databases and similar files) from the staging folder that's inside the ENERCALC_20 program files (x86) folder.

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.