Hi James,

Whoa! What looked like a deceptively simple query turned out to be pretty complex - I should've noted the >2Mb .inp file, haha!

First off - considering the scope and size, the level of detail you've chosen to undertake makes this a very ambitious model. I'm sure you already know, but in such large scale projects, unnecessary degrees of model detail could very possibly backfire in a bad way. What you're running into now is in part due to this, so I'm bringing it up to start and consider. Whatever you decide, I would generally caution to proceed at a deliberate pace and make such decisions very carefully, as you've got a lot on your plate already!

Before you go too much further, I would strongly reconsider your decision to define each exterior wall fa?ade with multiple coplanar facets. This strategy undoubtedly saved you some time for your custom window layouts, but the end result is you have something on the order of approximately 10 times the number of exterior surfaces in your model, relative to just one surface per orientation per zone. Not a big deal for a single story building, but multiplied over 22 shells (of which many are multi-story)... that's adding a LOT of bulk to the model. On the same front, you should reconsider whether the aesthetic advantages of modeling each individual window are really worth the drawbacks. Check me on this, but I think you'll find detailed-level edits will be much more difficult than usual as the spreadsheet views have limitations on the number of lines that can be displayed (something like 60,000), which I think you'll be exceeding. Modeling one or more 'equivalent' larger windows per fa?ade would certainly make this more manageable as well.

Those concerns raised - I've dug up the root of your immediate problem. Rather than just fix it, I figure it's probably more beneficial to you and others on the list if I walk through how I figured it out as well:

I observe 9 instances of the following error on trying to exit/finish the wizards:

Line 20154: Warning Encountered:

..

WINDOW is too wide or is mispositioned horizontally. WINDOW X value ( 0.11) + glass WIDTH ( 5.73) + FRAME WIDTH ( 0.11) should be less than WALL WIDTH ( 5.94).

Line 20156: Exterior Wall: E5 West Wall (G.SW3.E7

Each instance involves the same dimensions - and the numbers added up suggest there's likely a slight rounding error involved on eQuest's part (the segmented facets per above discussion are playing a role). Since the wizards are acting wonky, it's always a good idea to identify and resolve any such geometry-based warnings. Since you used custom window layout extensively, our fix will involve identifying and modifying the dimensions of the "problem windows" slightly - making them slightly narrower overall should fix the conflict. Rather than hunt/peck through the custom window layout screens (extensive work in this case), I prefer to apply notepad (or your text editor of choice) to the *.pd2 file as it's more time-efficient for such large projects:

Note that the *.pd2 file contains everything you do inside the wizards, but often in slightly different formats than what you'd expect from the BDL warnings. In this case, "Width" = glass + framex2 = 5.95 in the instance above. I used the 'find and replace' function to replace each instance of 'Width = 5.95' with 'Width = 5.94'.

After saving, closing, and re-opening the project in eQuest, this edit clears up the warnings on assembling the BDL (finishing the wizards). It would also appear the original issue is resolved: changes to your custom layout are saved after opening/closing the shell and window layout windows, and upon 'finishing' the wizards as well.

A final caution: I still observe a series of warnings related to delayed wall constructions (or lack therof for some plenum spaces). I think this is probably a red herring as you're still finishing your wizard-level work and will ultimately want to define some additional roofs for plenums exposed to the exterior, at which point I expect such cautions to go away.

Phew! Hope this helps a few people learn a thing or two - teach a man to fish, as they say!

~Nick

NICK CATON, P.E.