Ecotect has a lot of power for sun penetration studies and as a tool
to export and then import into Radiance. I wouldn't use it for
thermal simulation (we use IES primarily and DOE-2.2 occasionally).
The stereographic shading diagrams are accurate, but the tabular data
that is reported is incorrect when assessing Daylight Glare Control
under Australia's Green Star. This credit requires you to assess the
portion of business hours a point 1.5m in from the facade and desk
height is in shade. You either have to estimate the area off of the
sunpath diagrams (which isn't correct as hour lines converge at high
solar altitudes on the image) or resort to a different method which
requires twelve reports (one per month) to be created for every point
which takes a lot more time than it should. We have fed this back
repeatedly to SquareOne for years, then found out Autodesk now license
it. I am pretty sure our guys have fed this back to Autodesk as well
with no joy. For those that have had similar experiences I would
really encourage you to check this and provide the feedback to the
developers. It should be easily fixed but has persisted for years and
puts a bit of tarnish on an otherwise great piece of software.
Regards,
Graham Carter