topic Re: Zones for energy evaluation in Sustainable design

Zones for energy evaluation

R Muller — Thu, 11 May 2023 08:26:59 GMT

I am experimenting with the energy evaluation tool, but can't seem to create appropriate 3-dimensional zones. Are there better tools to manipulate zones?

Can I see and manipulate them in section? (for example, to stretch the height to meet the floor above)

Can I see the zone heights relative to project zero or to a story level instead of each zone having a height only relative to its base?

Is there a preferred way to crop a zone to match slabs and roofs in my model? Design/ roof extras? SEO operations?

Once a zone is cropped, is there any way to undo the crop?

Help!! I am just about ready to give up on the energy evaluation because the zones seem so difficult. I am working on a 4-story residential building on a hillside.

Re: Zones for energy evaluation

Laszlo Nagy — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 19:34:15 GMT

R wrote:
I am experimenting with the energy evaluation tool, but can't seem to create appropriate 3-dimensional zones. Are there better tools to manipulate zones?

Can I see and manipulate them in section? (for example, to stretch the height to meet the floor above)

I am afraid this is not possible. Actually, Zones are not even displayed in Sections.

Can I see the zone heights relative to project zero or to a story level instead of each zone having a height only relative to its base?

Unfortunately, no again. This bugs me, too, it is not easy to work with them this way.

Is there a preferred way to crop a zone to match slabs and roofs in my model? Design/ roof extras? SEO operations?

I don't think there is a preferred way. As long as the geometry becomes what you want, there is no preferred way. However, cropping is possible only with single-plane Roofs so if you have a Multi-plane Roof you either have to explode it to single-plane roofs or you have to use SEO.

Once a zone is cropped, is there any way to undo the crop?

In the Model panel of the Zone Settings Dialog, the Uncrop buttons for the Top and Bottom of the Zone become enabled when it is cropped.

Help!! I am just about ready to give up on the energy evaluation because the zones seem so difficult. I am working on a 4-story residential building on a hillside.

Re: Zones for energy evaluation

R Muller — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 20:16:17 GMT

laszlonagy- thanks for your reply. The user interface for the other features of the energy evaluation (setting materials, U-values, etc.) is so good and impressively user-friendly, it's too bad the zones themselves are so clunky and hard to manipulate.

I re-did my zones with only 2 or 3 zones per floor, rather than one for every room, which made it easier to get them to comply with the exterior elements and gives me many fewer "uncovered" areas.

There is still some problems, for example with the triangular side walls of roof dormers, which are not a whole story high, but only extend up from the main roof to the dormer. Is there a standard way to handle these? Since I am working with an old model started with AC12, all my roofs are single plane.

Also, I can't figure out how to handle the crawl space. The program seems to think the lowest floor is slab on grade, even though is is wood frame over crawl space. I have a mesh, which is cut out for the crawl space, but this is not recognized.

I can't find any documentation of what happens with "uncovered" facets of zones. If I go ahead and run a simulation with some areas "uncovered", does this mean that there is a big energy leak through the uncovered area?

Re: Zones for energy evaluation

Laszlo Nagy — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 20:26:41 GMT

Could you post some images about the specific issues you are facing and how it is handled now? Probably a 3D View of zones with uncovered areas shown.

Re: Zones for energy evaluation

R Muller — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 21:34:00 GMT

Here's the base model file.

Re: Zones for energy evaluation

R Muller — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 21:35:14 GMT

Here are uncovered surfaces.

Re: Zones for energy evaluation

R Muller — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 21:40:18 GMT

Here are zones and uncovered surfaces.

Re: Zones for energy evaluation

Laszlo Nagy — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 22:05:07 GMT

To tell you the truth, I have not used Energy Evaluation or EcoDesigner before so I don't have experience with how to reslove these uncovered surface issues of the Zone.
However, not that we have the screenshot, hopefully someone with more experience may chime in and give so good advice.

Re: Zones for energy evaluation

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 09:50:15 GMT

Im afraid I canthelp with any answers, I have a question of my own for using the energy evaluation in AC16

How do zones work? When I create them in the project is it acceptable to use the automatic zone creation tool, inner surfaces, reference lines? Reading the reference pdf, its not clear to me if the zones need to include the walls when seen in the energy evaluation model review, or can the zones just fill the internal spaces? Which is what I see when I open the model review at the moment.

Thanks

Re: Zones for energy evaluation

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 09:55:40 GMT

Ive attached an image showing my model, all the walls are shown as not included in the zones, is this correct? Or do I need to change the zones so that in the model reveiw they extend to include the building envelope?

Re: Zones for energy evaluation

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 14:02:50 GMT

strawbale wrote:
Ive attached an image showing my model, all the walls are shown as not included in the zones, is this correct? Or do I need to change the zones so that in the model reveiw they extend to include the building envelope?

you dont have to select walls with your zones...
if you select them too then you will have wrong Volume,Area etc parameters

these are used for 2 different inputs
zones will give you all needed information about volume, area etc
walls will give you U parameter or like US folks like to says R of your building envelope...

So, build your zones to fill interior of room

Re: Zones for energy evaluation

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 14:15:58 GMT

Thanks Necko, much appreciated. Makes sense I guess.

Re: Energy Evaluation, Zones, thermal values

Anonymous — Wed, 18 Sep 2013 13:26:22 GMT

I am just going through all the videos, guides, user guides, etc to see if I can get a basic understanding of the Energy Evaluation feature of AC 17. So far, a lot of questions and problems.

The major issue is zones. One minute they are okay, then on another try, it lists a number of "offending" zones. I fix these, and then another series of zones appear. It seems that the modeling system is never happy with all the room zones. I have tried the three different techniques for zones, polylines, etc. Still problems. Has anyone successfully manages to have "happy zones" all around?

Secondly, I have some basic questions in terms of approach. Is it really better to set up wall composites that automatically calculate thermal qualities of a wall? or to override this and just assign your own, based on calculations from a separate spreadsheet? I have been using more generic walls, rather than composites, but may need to go that direction all the way.

Another question is whether you need to assign thermal performance values to interior walls between spaces. (I think not, unless the interior wall is between two thermal zones, but am not sure).

If you draw a polyline inside a space to define the boundary (in cases where there is no contiguous surrounding wall), does the zone reflect the depth of penetration of doors and windows?

If a material that is part of your project (wall composite) is not in the "catalog" of materials, can the catalog be amended?

I have been trying to find an up-to-date user guide, to no avail. The videos are somewhat helpful, but not in terms of overall approach.

If anyone is willing to spend a bit of time answering questions by phone, I would appreciate it as well.