TRANSCRIPT

We're diving into day two topic.
We're going to start by focusing on building geometry.
And we'll talk about how building geometry is described in EnergyPlus,
what object types are actually needed to create building geometry,
how surface adjacencies are defined.
This is a little bit different than other simulation software.
And then we'll talk about materials and constructions.
Okay, so how is building geometry described in EnergyPlus?
So this right here is a little screenshot from the IDF editor.
Here we go.
There we go.
And now you can see my mask.
This is from the IDF editor, and this shows you all of the different object types
that are available to describe building geometry in EnergyPlus.
And there's a lot of stuff here.
We have the zone, which is one of the basic building blocks of EnergyPlus.
And then the building surface detailed and fenestration surface detail.
Most energy models that are created in EnergyPlus only use these objects
as far as your building blocks of your physical model.
So one of the things that I've been saying that is really important to remember
as you're learning EnergyPlus is that EnergyPlus is a big program.
It's very flexible.
There are a lot of objects, but it's most important to learn a workflow that works for you.
And if you have a workflow that works for you, you may not need any of these other objects.
Or perhaps at some point in the future, you realize, okay, I need to model something.
The objects I've been using aren't quite working, and then you can dive into the documentation,
do a little research, and find some additional objects that work for you.
But most of the EnergyPlus models are created using these three objects.
So that's in general what we'll focus on.
EP3 also gives you access to space as well as a zone.
And I'm a little bit guilty about interchanging these two words, space and zone.
Space is actually a relatively recent addition to EnergyPlus.
It's only been added in the past few years.
And what it does is it allows you to combine and define your internal loads
at a finer grain level than in your zone.
So every zone has at least one space, but it can have multiple spaces.
And if you don't actually create your own space, EnergyPlus will do it internally for you.
Okay, so the key workflow is to learn, or I'm sorry, the key takeaway is to learn workflows
that serve your modeling goals and don't worry about the rest.
So revisiting this diagram of connections.
Again, I recommend you develop a way of kind of interpreting and understanding EnergyPlus
with these kind of informal diagrams.
I do these a lot by hand.
I generally have a piece of paper and a pencil next to me while I'm modeling something new in EnergyPlus.
And we'll just kind of draw these connections so it understands the shape of the model.
A little review here, but we're talking about surfaces and zones.
We connect surfaces back to a zone referencing a zone name.
And we connect a construction or assign a construction to a particular building surface using names as well.
And a reminder that field order matters, but objects can be in any order.
So surface is basic building block of EnergyPlus.
So we're looking at the building surface detailed object here.
And this is the surface designation that's used by most user interfaces.
It is absolutely the most flexible.
So if we go back to all the different object types here that is not building surface detailed,
we have wall, roof, exterior wall, idiomatic wall, underground wall, interzone wall.
Each of these individual objects are relatively simple on their own,
but they only do one individual very specific thing.
Whereas the building surface detail allows you to create an interior wall, an exterior wall.
It can have any type of surface adjacency.
It can be idiomatic. It can be underground.
It can basically be anything you want it to be as long as it's a surface.
Right, so let's look at some critical fields.
In EP3, we will bold the required fields.
And where possible, EP3 will generate a default value for those bold fields.
So in general, when you create an EP3 model and you translate it to EnergyPlus,
you shouldn't have or you shouldn't have very many missing required fields.
Okay, construction name.
In EP3, the construction name is generated based on the, it's actually the sketchup color that is assigned to the wall.
So if you want to change the construction of a bunch of walls,
all you need to do is grab one of the EP3 or basically a sketchup color that is connected to an EP3 construction.
And we'll show you how to do that a little bit later in this session and just change the color of the walls.
We'll just display this for you here, but this is an auto-calculated value.
Any inputs that are grayed out in EP3, these are auto-calculated inputs.
Okay, zone and space name. Again, auto-generated for you.
A boundary condition. I'm only going to talk about this a little bit deeper.
And then a sun exposure and a wind exposure.
If you have not manually entered anything into these boxes, we will automatically decide for you whether the surface is sun exposed and wind exposed or not.
But you can override those values.
So in general, an interior surface will not have sun or wind exposure and an exterior surface would have sun and wind exposure.
A view factor to ground. This is a required field, but it has an auto-calculate value and we just leave this alone.
We let energy plus itself auto-calculate this.
So you'll see auto-calculate and auto-size as potential field values all over energy plus, particularly in the HVAC systems.
Then we have the number of vertices.
So this has four vertices and we're showing you the first vertices.
And this is always in metric units.
One of the things to know about energy plus, and this is related to the different types of building surfaces that are available, is that energy plus has been around for a long time.
And a lot of the object types that exist were created years and years ago.
And then maybe there was a newer model that was created that's better than the older model, but they never retired that old model.
So that old object type is still in energy plus and it's easy as a new user to get overwhelmed or confused by all these extra object types.
And I really recommend that you take a look at some of the PNNL prototype building models.
Those have been maintained and updated regularly, so they generally have a relatively modern energy plus architecture.
Again, looking at zone and space, zone is a requirement for the surface and space is not.
That is partly because space is a newer addition to energy plus.
You don't actually have to have a space designation energy plus, although EP3 by default creates spaces and allows you to use spaces.
As always in EP3, you can click view IDF and take a look at the IDF for this particular object.
All right, spaces versus zone.
So here we're looking at a space and in EP3 when you select a space in the Outliner, it will highlight that space on the floor plan for you.
We can think of spaces as sort of a volume of air that includes some surfaces, heat transfer surfaces, thermal mass objects, and are assigned to internal loads.
Zones are made up of one or more spaces.
Interior loads can be assigned at either the space or the zone level or both.
We'll talk about internal loads in a lot more detail tomorrow, but we recommend that you choose to assign internal loads either to spaces or to zones throughout your model.
It just keeps it very clean if you designate.
I'm assigning internal loads at the space level or I'm assigning internal loads at the zone level.
It can get kind of confusing if you assign it at both.
Each space is assigned to a zone and in EP3 you can change the zone.
So we actually have here this is a zone that's a ground floor or a five residential apartment, something, something.
Can't read quite the whole name, but here I'm going to show you that if we mouse over these spaces on the left, there are a couple different volumes that are all contained within the same zone.
So in this case, this model is of an apartment building and you could model.
So this space over here that we looked at on the last slide is just one large apartment.
This one here, we're breaking up the apartment into the actual specific occupancy types, so bedroom and general apartment space.
So if you wanted to assign different occupancy to bedrooms versus living room, this is how you could do it while still keeping just one HVAC system that serves the entire apartment.
Okay, surface adjacencies. Again, there are a lot of options and EP3 will choose the most appropriate option, but you can override that option.
So with this particular wall, EP3 has chosen outdoors as its adjacency.
I could basically mean that's an exterior wall.
These, sorry, it's a little bit confusing that this wall is still circled, but right now we're just looking at these options as an outside boundary condition.
For underground surfaces, we recommend either choosing ground or ground FC factor.
So ground, and this is essentially telling energy plus what temperature are you simulating on the other side of your surface.
And if an FC factor method is chosen, it's looking for a specific construction type, which will give a perimeter loss factor.
It's basically an F factor material, which defines a perimeter loss instead of surface area loss.
There are a lot of different ground type models, all of these ground basement preprocessor, slab preprocessor, etc.
We don't use them in our practice with energy plus.
We recommend using either ground or ground FC factor method.
And again, EP3 will choose these for you just so you understand what EP3 is doing.
Interior surface options, and we should actually be looking at a wall, an interior wall at this moment.
But by default, EP3 interior surface adjacencies are simulated as if sort of half of the wall is in one space,
and half of the wall is in another space, and you have two surfaces that are adjacent to each other.
So actually, let's exit under this presentation for a second.
Okay, so this is the same model, and we're looking at an interior wall.
We have the outside boundary condition has been selected to be surface.
And up here, with a lot of objects in EP3, you can look for different buttons here.
Different objects have some additional properties, and here you can see view adjacent surface.
So this is the surface that's in the ground floor 05 residential apartments.
And then this number right here is a surface number, which we use to ensure that each surface had a unique name.
But this is the ground floor 05 surface.
If we look at ground floor 05, so it's this space here.
If I click view adjacent surface, this is the ground floor 05A residential bedroom surface.
So ground floor 05A, so that that makes sense.
This is the surface that separates these two spaces.
Another way to define an interior surface is to is very similar to the way equest defines it, where instead of saying we're going to define the surface as being adjacent to another surface kind of half and half is we assign the surface as being entirely inside one space.
And you can select a zone as the adjacent surface.
Now, you'll notice that space isn't an option on this list.
And this is one of those things where energy class is evolving.
The convention of using a surface as the adjacency was established.
That's what all of you at UIs that I'm familiar with use zone is kind of an old way of defining surface adjacencies.
So when they added space, they didn't add it to this list as a surface adjacency.
But this this is an option and you will see this in some energy plus example files.
You will see that zone is used as a surface adjacency.
We also have an adiabatic option.
And in EP3, when we have these intermediate floors and ceilings, this is this entire surface, all of these surfaces are adiabatic constructions.
Okay, one of the questions across all modeling tools is how much building geometry detail do we want to include the more detail we add the more time consuming it is to draw.
And the less detail we have in the model, the less we're sure that our results are actually appropriate for that particular building.
So we need some basic information like space area and volume exterior surface areas and orientation, thermal properties of surfaces, fenestration surface area and orientation and shading both self shading and other.
Okay, so here's a little little video that I did to illustrate some of the simplifications that we can make.
So this is on the left is a single zone building single space single zone building with a little bit of a complex state.
And here I am.
I'm going to build something that kind of simplifies the shape.
I'm going to make just a square.
That is the same surface area.
And I'm going to create a roof surface for that simplified shape.
We'll give it the same properties.
And I'll generate my walls.
And now I'm going to double check and say, okay, do I have the same surface areas in each orientation?
And I'm using those sketch up tools up here on the right to check surface areas.
Don't quite have the same surface area.
So now I need to adjust my approximated structure to give it make sure that the surface area is aligned.
So in this case, I'm changing the roof height a little bit to make the walls taller so that I end up with a little bit more wall surface area.
Now I double checking the work roof surface area to see if we have some agreement.
And this case we do.
And then I'm going to add some windows based on percent window to wall ratio.
And I'm going to manually set the volume of the space because I'm not sure that the volume is actually the same.
Okay, so let's open this discussion up.
I'd like to talk about the pros and cons of creating geometry with a lot of detail.
How far do we want to go in our models?
How much detail do we want to add to our models?
And what are the benefits of a lot of detail?
And what are the drawbacks of a lot of detail?
Let's see.
I'll just do this and edit mode here.
Okay.
There we go.
Okay.
Bob, do we have some ideas coming in?
Pros and cons.
Yeah, I was just writing that as a question of the purpose of simplifying.
Yeah.
Let's see.
Creating geometry with a lot of detail.
The pros is that you have a nice looking building.
Okay.
That matches.
You see what you get.
Yep.
Wizzy, are you all familiar with the term wizzy wig?
What you see?
What you see is what you get.
Definitely, that's a big one.
What's another one?
It's a very common term in the nerd world, especially with web developers.
Yes.
Yep.
Commonly called wizzy wig.
Yes.
Someone listed a con.
Good.
And that is the amount of effort.
Yep.
And then also listed higher potential for modeling error.
In the pros.
In the cons.
I think that would be a con, right?
Higher potential for modeling error when we have a lot of detail.
Yeah.
With a lot of detail, you're more likely to make a mistake somewhere.
I think that's pretty good.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
So there's more places you can kind of mess up.
Yes.
Okay.
I can think of a con if we're on that topic.
Yep.
Is simulation time will increase?
Yep.
Yep.
Anything else on the pro side?
Because I actually have quite a few that I put on the pro side.
You can add one.
Well, you should get increased accuracy and shading and thermal mass.
Yep.
Accuracy.
Shading.
I find that, well, we can maybe put this on the con side.
So any simplifications that you make follow you all the way through the end of the model.
And so sometimes you have less accuracy due to simplifications.
So I find that depending on your skill with drawing and the tools that you have at hand,
sometimes it is less effort to drawing more detailed building than to make all of the
decisions about how you want to simplify and why.
So there's sort of no lost effort in figuring out how to simplify.
All right.
Anything else coming in from?
The one that I would add for increased accuracy, which definitely comes up and it's more and
more popular, is daylighting.
Yep.
Yes.
So we have a tip.
It's not going to make the list.
It's a good tip is if you want a nice picture of the building for a report,
take a screenshot of the rabbit model.
I don't know.
Okay.
Yep.
That's an adjacent tip.
Obviously not for our list, but it is a, I've done that and it is a common trick and it gets the point across.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It definitely is the nice building, the nice looking building is a big class.
If you can put that in your reports and show it to your clients that this is the building that we modeled.
If you're showing them the model and it looks visually, they're very different than their
building, then there can be, yeah, there can be some loss of trust.
And even if mathematically, the model is great.
We could completely deconstruct this, this model and put surfaces a little bit, you know,
if, if we're not doing daylighting, we could completely kind of explode the surfaces here,
assign a volume and still have a model that is mathematically correct and looks absolutely terrible.
So that's kind of, that's kind of the point.
Okay.
Great.
All right.
So we're going to talk about materials.
Oh, one person added a pro and that is the higher detail for EEM opportunities.
Great.
And obviously the amount of effort is also relates to your time.
If you're in a hurry and you have a tough deadline, obviously simplifications are the only way to go.
Yes, I think they, they can be time same thing.
They can.
Oh, you're saying that you can make up the time.
I think, I think it depends on your tools.
It depends on your tools.
It can be time consuming to create detailed geometry.
It can also be time consuming to simplify.
I think the, the little example that I showed, showed that it actually can take a fair amount of time to make those simplifications and, and have everything result in something that agrees with the original intent.
So it can be time consuming on both sides.
Yes.
So I think, yep.
I would point out that it's a lot easier to draw in EP three than in equest, for example, and it's also a lot easier to draw than open studio from my brief experience so far in EP three.
So when you're when you know how to use the drawing tool, and you're very familiar with it.
I agree that you might save time by just drawing it as is.
Yeah, I think this is one thing where the balance of this equation shifted for me when I switched tools when I started using a tool where they better drawing user interface this whole all of this effort of simplification for input efficiency.
Those questions kind of slid off the table.
Okay, sure.
There, there's still simplifications that happen, but I didn't have to make massive simplifications.
It could be small simplifications.
Okay, so we're going to talk about materials and then constructions.
So again, with surfaces similar to surfaces, there are a ton of different material types in, in energy plus.
And again, my mantra for the entire course is going to is going to be figure out your workflow, figure out the individual object types that work for you and serve your purpose.
And learn those when you come to a point where you can't model something, you have something new that you need to model an energy plus then start exploring some of these other ones.
But most projects are feasible with only these materials and construction types.
So these are materials and then these are construction types.
If and when you need access to more complex construction types, a lot can be modeled an energy plus.
So some of the ones that I find kind of interesting are like roof vegetation material, thermochromatic waving, you can do movable shading, phase change materials.
There's also an internal heat source so you can model radiant panels or floors or ceilings or whatever.
Okay, so let's create and assign some constructions in EP3.
So we're just going to do some live modeling in EP3 now.
So yesterday we briefly looked at two different dialogues in EP3.
We had this dialogue give us all of our kind of intangible type objects.
And then we have the selected object dialogue.
So it will give us information about whatever we have clicked with our sketchup pointer.
And then here we have a construction dialogue.
So this gives us information about every different construction type.
The materials are found in this incandibles dialogue.
And if we want to just look for all of our material type objects, we can actually just type material in here and cab over.
And we can toggle between all object types that are available and just the ones that are in the model.
So we'll start by looking at the actual, the material object.
So this is this is the most fully defined material in energy plus.
It has a name as everything else has a surface roughness, thickness, connectivity, density, specific heat,
thermal absorptance, solar absorptance, visible absorptance.
This is the material type that you want to use for any kind of heavier weight material,
concrete, metal, gypsum, wood, anything that's not just an uber light insulation material.
These particular materials came from the materials data set that we looked at and we accessed through the IDF editor yesterday.
Same with these two.
These are air gap materials.
So this is just giving us a thermal resistance for a gap within a wall.
The wall air gap resistance, it might be a layer of gypsum board and then an air gap and then another layer of gypsum board.
No mass materials are generally just used for insulating materials.
They have an R value, roughness and a couple other properties.
And then at this simple glazing system, this is generally what we use on our projects.
Although you can choose glazing that has more complex glazing properties.
So look at those in a moment.
But these have a u-factor, solar heat gain coefficient and visible transmit notes.
We also have window.
So there's window material glazing.
And this is if you have actual kind of glass data available for your window.
And some of these are available in the data set in the construction and materials data set.
And then there's also a window material gas object.
So you could have a couple layers of glazing gas, glazing and gas due to double or triple pane windows.
I'm just going to do these.
Now under the constructions dialog, if we select a particular construction,
the parentheses, you can see what type of object this is.
So the adiabatic construction is a construction.
This below grade wall construction is a C factor underground wall.
We also have in this model an F factor construction.
So a normal construction object and you can change the type of definition for a construction in EP3.
The reason we did that is you may decide that you want to change from an F factor underground material to a regular construction with layers for underground materials.
But you don't want to have to go through and repaint your model with all of the new construction layers.
Or I'm sorry, you don't want to reassign all of your surfaces to that new construction.
You just want to change the type of construction.
Okay, so here we have, there are a lot of fields and in EP3 we've added a lot of extra intelligence to constructions.
So these first, how many fields?
All of these fields are EP3 specific fields.
These fields that come later, these are the energy class fields.
So we'll start there and we'll revisit these ones later.
So a construction type will just have a number of layers.
And you have access to any of those materials.
So we have access to our, I think this residential roof construction insulation.
This was a material no mass object.
We have access to our airspace materials.
We have access to our fully defined materials as well.
So you can just select the layers of materials with a C factor underground wall.
These are the two energy plus inputs.
And we can specify the C factor, the loss factor, and the height of the wall.
F factor material.
Okay, this one's exciting because the model just changed colors.
So F factor materials are ones where the perimeter loss is what drives the loss across that surface.
So let's define a perimeter because there is no perimeter defined in this model.
In EP3 we can automatically assign the perimeter or we can manually add the perimeter.
So that automatically assign the perimeter where we go through and we take a look.
So this pink color is our F factor material.
So all of our underground floors are assigned to the F factor material.
And what we're looking for is any place where the underground material has a border edge.
So this is, let's go back here where the line is red.
These are the locations that EP3 has automatically detected that there is a kind of an air boundary and edge boundary.
And we can, if we wanted to remove some of these perimeter edges, we just select them and say remove perimeter edges.
For each surface that has an F factor material, a new version of this construction is created when you translate to energy plus.
So let's actually do that translation.
In energy plus, so we have the F factor which is common across all of these different surfaces.
And then energy plus also needs to know the area of the surface and the amount of perimeter that is exposed.
And for each of these surfaces, the area and the perimeter may be different.
And that is the place where we ask EP3 to figure out what is the surface area and what is the perimeter.
And then to generate a custom F factor material or a custom F factor construction so that when energy plus simulates, it knows these values on its own.
I'm not sure if everybody is familiar with F factor, I think they are.
Just a reminder that F factor is basically a U factor but only along the adjacency to the ground.
And so it's per foot instead of foot squared.
And it's required to be reported when you do a compliance model.
There's a 90.1 reference and you do have to model your F factor values.
Yes, thanks Bob.
So the units for F factor here are BTs per hour per foot per degree Fahrenheit.
Whereas the units for a regular material that is where the heat loss factor is determined based on surface area is, let's see, material.
Your mask, the heat loss factor here is in BTs per hour per square foot.
So this is an area factor and this is a linear factor.
Okay.
Now, before we take a look at that.
Instruction, F factor, ground floor.
Okay, so we have a very, very long name here.
But this is the ground floor O2 elevator surface number F factor material.
And then we have the F factor, the area and the perimeter exposed.
And we can look at different, for different surfaces, the F factor stays the same.
We have a change in area and we have a change in the perimeter exposed.
Now, I mentioned before that we have some additional inputs in EP3 for constructions.
So one is the construction type where we can change the construction type if you want to.
There's a compliance parameter, construction is all new.
So this is part of the ASHRAE baseline generator, which is under development.
We have a construction is glazing checkbox.
And in general, EP3 will detect whether the construction is a glazing construction based on whether the construction is see-through or not.
All of our windows right here are painted with constructions that we can see through.
If the construction is glazing, you will be limited to only glazing type layers.
And if the construction is not glazing, you'll be limited to non-glazing type layers.
We have also a construction adjacency.
We get an expected adjacency.
And what you can do is you can use this as a way to help air check your model.
So if we have a exterior wall construction and our expected adjacency is outdoors,
but we have a wall that's an interior wall.
And I have my residential exterior wall construction selected and I can paint.
So if I change my e-selected material here, it will change the construction type.
And just allow me to paint the wall with a different construction type.
But now I have an interior wall that is assigned an exterior construction type.
So when you export this file and go to simulate it, you will get a warning from EP3 that says, hey, we noticed that you have a wall.
We detected that it's interior wall.
You were expecting it to be exterior.
You might want to go check this out.
This is a little bit of an advanced parameter infiltration rate in general.
This and if you mouse over, you can get some tooltips on this as well.
When something, an EP3 special object called component infiltration is used,
component infiltration allows you to calculate the infiltration rate per surface area.
We developed this when we had a project.
It was a massive school renovation and there were five different phases of construction starting in I think 1920.
There was like a 1920 edition.
There was a 1950 edition.
There was a 1965 renovation.
There was a 1970 edition.
I mean, there were so many different phases of construction and there were certain spaces that actually had walls
that were half from 1920 and half from 1996 and they had vastly different infiltration properties.
Instead of figuring out the infiltration rate for each individual space,
we just said we're going to assign an infiltration rate per square foot to each type of construction
and allow the computer to kind of figure it out for us.
This is something, if anybody is interested in learning how to do this,
we can revisit this in a special topics on day eight.
Questions about materials and constructions?
We had several good questions.
Great.
Let's see.
I'm going to try to ask these in order that makes sense.
Can EP3 accept outputs of LBNL's window tool while simulating glazing systems?
A window tool.
I believe the window tool creates a set of energy plus objects, IDF objects,
which you can import just using the importer.
So if you want to import just an IDF snippet, say a schedule or a particular material,
you can just paste it right here.
So I can double check with you on that, but I'm 90% sure that yes,
and you would just paste the piece of IDF right here.
So you paste it in and click the button.
I imagine all of the fields are there if you had to do that manually,
but it does export a lot of data.
So importing it seems more logical.
The next question along the lines of glazing,
something that's really important is low E coatings.
And is that available when you set up a glazing type?
Yeah, so generally, I mean, there are a couple of different models to use for glazing materials.
There's the window material simple glazing system where the solar heat gain coefficient is generally driven by those low E glazing types.
So this is the simplest way to set up your glazing.
And this is the number that you'll get from your NFRC rating on your windows.
It would be something that would go here.
But there you can do more detailed versions of this using the more detailed window objects, window material objects.
Okay, so the next question that is it's a really good question and it might be a little bit too long of an answer to cover exactly how to do this is,
can we model a construction with insulation between steel studs affected by thermal bridging in EP3?
Um, I have a simple answer is no.
Well, it's a little bit complicated.
Generally, generally, I have run calculations say in therm or another program that does more complete and complex analysis of an entire construction type to get an average r value for those particular types of situations.
If there's a particular portion in the building where there's steel studs, so let's say like this, this corner had a particular condition.
I could send the, you know, maybe this was like 30 centimeter by 30 centimeter, roughly one foot by one foot situation where I had a just terrible thermal bridge.
I can create a construction called steel column.
I'm going to select it as a construction type.
The outside boundary condition is going to be outdoors.
And then, oh yeah, steel column.
And if I paint it, so now I have this different construction type, and I'm just going to select this metal surface.
I'd probably go in and describe a different metal surface.
I think this metal surface is quite thin and a steel column would be multiple layers of a little bit thicker metal and some airspace resistance.
But this is what I would do if I had kind of a larger scale specific instance of a large thermal bridge.
But these small thermal bridges that are in over the course of an entire surface, they generally do with an average r value.
Yeah, there are ASHRAE guidelines for modeling that, that simplify studs into having a net average set of layers, and they account for the thermal bridging over the full area of the wall instead of the individual beams.
I can't think of the exact ASHRAE section.
I've done this multiple times.
And so you look up the stud material and the insulation in between, and it gives you a net overall U value.
Yep.
Yeah, I have also done some evaluation, and sometimes I think ASHRAE actually a little bit overestimates the performance.
So sometimes these slightly worse performance values than ASHRAE to represent those constructions, but yes.
However, I will say, I will take a look and get back to you tomorrow because it's possible that buried in that really long list of energy class material types is a material type or a construction type that can do this.
And so I'll let you know.
This is one of those things where it's, it's possible and it's quite a good idea to go and take a look in, in the energy plus documentation.
I will say, I am not in live class time going to go through and show you how to draw a building in EP3.
So we'll send you, we have two tutorials that go into a lot of detail about drawing custom floor plans and complex roof shapes and tracing, tracing drawings.
So I think it makes a lot more sense for you each to do those at your own pace.
So what I'd like to do is one thing I meant to do yesterday, we'll talk about some simulation parameters and how we control our simulation.
Before we start on this next session, someone asked to elaborate on the difference between zones and spaces.
And I know that that can mean a number of things.
However, if you could just cover that briefly on some of the things that you can do with multiple spaces and zones, or if you have more than one zone per space and so on.
Yes, absolutely.
So, and this is a great model to have open to talk about this because right here.
So these, as I'm mousing over these, I'm sorry, these blocks.
Essentially, all of the blocks that you see in EP3 in 3D, these are all spaces.
And if you go to the selected object dialogue box and you click on one of them.
Sometimes you have to click twice.
If you click on one of them, you'll see that it is assigned to a zone and it's assigned by name.
And there's a list of all the different zones in the model.
And in general, we just have one space per zone.
One thing about EP3 is that if an object or a field references something else and you click on that field, it will actually take you to the dialogue information for that particular object.
You don't have a back button yet, but you can kind of move forward and navigate the model that way.
So if we go to one of these spaces and we go to the zone, you'll see that this zone incorporates multiple spaces.
The advantage of this is that and we'll be talking about internal loads tomorrow.
If you have a lighting object, you can select, you have a lot of different options of things to select.
You can select, this is a space.
You can select a zone and then we can also select a zone list down here.
So we can assign an individual internal loads object to a single zone, a single space or a list of zones or a list of spaces.
So if we organize our model into spaces and we assign internal loads based on spaces, that means that in the bedrooms, I could have a schedule.
Okay, so this is a kind of average occupancy schedule for an apartment.
So if this was a bedroom schedule, I might reduce my occupancy down to zero or close to zero during the day and then have an opposite or somewhat opposite schedule at night.
So at night it would probably be, I'm sorry.
This would be my bedroom schedule.
So occupied at night, not so occupied during the day.
I could have a different schedule for the living space.
I'm sorry, no.
So it's okay.
Well, I don't have a schedule that looks somewhat like I want it to quickly.
No, this is also residential.
In the occupancy during the day and the, or I'm sorry, the occupancy in the living room would be pretty low at night and just have a bump in the morning and evening.
So you can really fine tune your internal loads and your schedules for each individual zone.
And this gets back to this question about how much do I simplify?
Because you can kind of combine everything and throw everything into one pot and that does work.
But anytime there's a change to any one of those parameters, you have to remember how you got there in order to update those parameters.
So if you're going through multiple iterations of modeling, the architect is making some changes.
The facility manager has decided that we're going to change the way we use this space a little bit.
I find that it's very helpful to have a little bit more granularity in the model.
And in a well-structured model, it doesn't, you don't have massive amounts of penalties for simulation time.
It kind of depends on your application.
Does that answer the question?
Yeah, I think so.
Okay.
This, this zones versus spaces and what does each one mean?
This will, this theme will follow us the next couple of days as well.
Definitely tomorrow we'll be talking about it again.
And I agree that you typically don't want to over complicate matters.
Yeah. Yeah.
I would do this level of granularity if I was doing a detailed study on a perhaps like a high-end residence with something very particular going on.
I would not do that level of granularity in a large apartment building where there's a ton of diversity.
It's just, you get a lot of sort of averaging happening and that makes sense.
Yeah. Unless you're looking at thermal comfort or things like that.
Right.
The net result on the energy is going to be inconsequential.
Yeah. Thanks, Bob. You make a good point.
I think that the, and I asked somebody this question in the forum yesterday of, okay, what sort of answers are you looking for?
What sort of questions are you looking to have answered with energy modeling?
So if our question is how much energy is this building going to use over the course of the year, then allowing some of these internal loads to mix together a little bit faster than they would in real life,
maybe isn't going to have a huge impact on the energies.
But if we're looking at the thermal comfort or perhaps we're looking at daylighting in a space where it's actually quite chopped up instead of just one big space,
or any number of other more fine-grained pieces of information, then we need to create a model that can answer those questions for us.
So there's no one way to create a model.
There's, we need to find the way to create the model so that it gives us, it is robust enough to answer our questions.
And there's that balance between, okay, you could create a super fine-grained model for absolutely every building that can answer any question that anybody ever wanted to ask about it.
But then you have the time penalty both on creating the model and on simulation times.
All right, any other questions or should we go on to this piece on location and simulation parameters?
Yeah, I think it's good to move on.
Okay.
So, vocation and simulation parameters.
So most user interfaces and energy simulation engines will have a kind of global settings.
Like I'm going to set my location to Burlington, Vermont, and I want to simulate from January 1st to December 31st.
How does energy class define site and simulation parameters?
Through objects, of course.
So everything in energy class is an reject.
And with EP3, we've opted not to change that.
We are still giving you access to those objects that control site and simulation.
So here are a couple of those objects in energy class.
There's a version object.
There's a building object which determines North Access, Terrain, Solar Distribution.
There's simulation control.
So are we going to do automated sizing for zones?
Are we going to do automated sizing for systems?
What about plants?
How are we going to warm up the building, et cetera?
There's a time step object, which one of the reasons that energy plus takes a little bit longer to simulate is that you can simulate in time steps that are less than an hour.
The default is actually four time steps per hour, but you can go up to 60 time steps per hour.
So it does one iteration per minute.
There is an object that determines the algorithm used for shadow calculations.
And then there's some surface convection algorithm settings as well.
So there are a lot of things in here that allow you to change how the simulation runs.
And that can impact the simulation.
And there's a whole bunch of other object types, just like any area of energy plus.
These are the ones that are absolutely necessary for simulating.
So there's a lot of things in here that allow you to change how the simulation runs.
And that can impact the kind of accuracy and performance of your simulation.
These are the ones that are absolutely necessary for simulating.
Okay, so we look at the building object.
We can set a north axis.
We can set the terrain.
And then there's some convergence tolerances and solar distribution that you can generally just leave as defaults.
Let's go back into EP3 for a second.
Because if we look at the interviews top, if we look at the top from the top,
do we have a red axis, a green axis, and then actually coming straight up is a blue axis?
And EP3 is taking this green axis as the north axis.
Now you can actually grab objects inside the building geometry and use your statue tools to rotate them.
But we recommend kind of working on the XY axis.
You'll have a much better time drawing if it's on a clean red, green XY axis
and adjust your building north axis here using this value.
That's pretty much the same as any other software.
Yep.
So here we have the same building object in EP3, building object in the IDF editor.
These are different files, but different north axis with terrain kind of subtly affects the wind conditions.
And then we have an object called the simulation control, which dictates what type of simulation we're going to do.
EP3 will generate this for you and will default to say, yes, I want to do all the different types of auto sizing.
I want to run the simulation for sizing periods and I want to run the simulation for weather file runs.
When you're in troubleshoot mode, you can reduce the number of simulations that you're doing.
I do recommend always allowing the sizing calculations to run.
But sometimes for troubleshooting, all you need to do is run the simulation for sizing periods.
You don't need to run your file through an entire year in order to track certain variables.
We're looking in a lot more detail on troubleshooting models on Thursday.
So yes, that would be gay for.
Okay, and then for location and climate, we have a run period which dictates when the model simulates.
Normally you would run a project for an entire year, so it would be January 1st through December 31st, where you can have multiple.
So again, if you were troubleshooting, you might have a run period of January 1st to January 10th.
And you might have another one from, say, July 1st to July 10th.
So you just want to take a snapshot from the winter and a snapshot from the summer and check out a couple variables and see what's happening.
And that's going to help you get much faster simulation time.
So these are some of the ways that we're going to balance the penalty of working with NRG Plus, which has a longer simulation time,
and reduce that burden by manipulating some of these parameters.
We also have sizing periods, which determine the conditions under which we're going to do our heating and our cooling sizing calculations.
We have a site location object.
We have ground temperature parameters.
And we have this thing called run period control special days.
So this allows you to designate dates that are associated with a special day.
So you could have custom, I think you're allowed custom day one and custom day two.
So in your schedule, you can specify schedule values for a custom day one, custom day two, and this run period control tells the program globally when those days are.
We have to have a run period if in the simulation control it says we want to run for a run periods.
And we need sizing periods in order to do our system siding.
There are a couple of different types of sizing period objects.
This is the most standard and the one you have the most control over.
So it has a name.
It gives a date, the day type.
So winter design day and summer design day.
Energy plus by default uses winter design day, summer design day and still heating design day and cooling design day.
I get a little bit lazy with my language and use them a bit interchangeably.
You can set the temperature, dry bulb and wet bulb temperature and a lot of other parameters here.
This is the most detailed sizing day designation.
However, the limitation is that when you if you want to run your file with multiple weather locations, you would need to change the sizing parameters for each weather file.
It's not flexible.
What we create by default in EP3 is either sizing period weather file days or sizing period weather file condition type.
I believe it's the weather file condition type where we're telling energy class to look in the weather file definition
or predefined weather file definition because each EPW weather file not only has your 8,760 hours of weather file data,
but it also has some data about the extreme sizing conditions for heating and cooling.
Sizing period weather file days will essentially run your simulation for a period of time.
This one is running from the beginning of January to the end of January.
So essentially the month of January and it's figuring out what the worst condition is in the normal weather file for the month of January and sizing for that particular condition.
So this is the weather file condition type sizing period.
This is the one that's created by EP3.
And we have an extreme summer weather period and extreme winter weather period.
And what this means is that this file is very flexible.
You can change the weather file that you run it with and the sizing conditions will change automatically inside the energy class simulation absolutely flawlessly.
If you want to specify your sizing parameters, you absolutely can.
What you would do is you would delete these or kind of turn them off and create new sizing parameters that are fully defined.
Does that speed up the simulation by selecting those models since it's only sizing over a few months instead of the entire year?
Yeah, so by the different sizing types, what you select for your sizing parameters will affect the length of simulation.
So if you have a sizing period design day, it will run just for that one design day for your forecycling.
If you're doing the sizing period weather file days, then it would run for an entire month.
And so the sizing period of your simulation would take a bit longer.
It's not like OKO.
It multiplies by 31 because for each simulation period and energy plus, there's a period of time where energy plus goes through a warm up.
It goes through a warm up period where it's getting the building starting and it's and it's iterating until with the weather conditions at the beginning of the weather file until it reaches a stable point.
So it's trying to figure out how what state the building is in when it starts the simulation.
So this, even though it's running for 31 days instead of one day, it's not 30 times longer.
But it is going to be a little bit longer because the warm up time period or the time it takes to stimulate the warm up will be similar between all of these.
I'd have to take a look back into the.
Yeah, does that make sense?
I think I'd have to take a look back into the EPW weather file.
But under the hood, I think this and this look pretty similar.
It's just that here you as the modeler have control over all of these parameters.
And here you are relying on the creator of that weather file to have done things and set it up properly for you.
Yep.
Makes sense.
It's two options and one is automatic and the other one is just more specific.
Yeah.
Okay, so there's some unique energy plus location and simulation capabilities.
One is that you can do multi year simulation.
You can specify the exact year that you want to simulate.
You can specify the start date of the year.
You have you have a lot of control over your simulation.
This one I thought was really interesting.
And I actually learned about this was preparing for the course and looking at all the different site objects in energy plus.
You can actually set a variable location, but you can simulate the energy use on a ship that is sailing around the world and change the latitude and the longitude as you go.
Now you have to act and have a weather file that agrees with this variable location object, but you can actually simulate that in energy plus.
That's really interesting.
Yeah.
That was fascinating.
I also specify some performance parameters for the simulation.
So if you remember back at the beginning, we're looking at like service convection algorithm, shadow calculation.
We can choose from a couple of different types of calculation algorithms for specific internal parts of the file.
So yeah, there are a couple of algorithms that take longer and are a little bit more accurate and different algorithms that are having a quicker runtime, but may give a little bit less accuracy.
And you can specify that in your energy plus in profile.
Okay, any questions before we go to a live example of this?
Someone asked a question, somewhat unrelated.
Yep.
Is if the training is going to cover daylighting and effects of shading devices?
We can actually, we have a bit more time today than I was expecting.
We've gotten through a little bit for us.
We can actually talk about daylighting devices and shading right now, if you like.
Well, let's let's finish up with an example on the on the simulation parameters.
But yes, we could we can get to that today.
Okay, great.
Yeah.
I don't see any other questions here.
Okay.
So let's see.
Okay.
Where do we find these?
We have our object types default run period created by and got your 31st.
So if we wanted to, we could create a.
And now if I export and simulate and we look at our results, we'll see we'll just have results for those two particular time periods.
So I'm going to want to export, which takes a minute.
Yeah, Karen, there's some strange audio problems going on.
Does it still sound strange?
Now it sounds better.
There was a strange feedback.
Okay.
I'm not sure what that was, but let me know if it happens again.
Okay, we'll do.
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Okay.
When it closed out of the wizard and just import and example file.
g plus example file to import.
It's probably because it's a new install of EP3,
and EP3 doesn't yet know where to find the example files.
So you go to this EP3 toolbar and click on Settings
and say, look for the energy plus location here.
If you don't see it, you can say change energy plus location.
And you just need to navigate to the location
where you've installed energy plus version 24.2
and then click Select Folder.
Now a couple people were having some issues related
to that yesterday.
So let me know if you have any questions or challenges
with that.
OK, so import.
We'll use our fried-zone recalls.
And let's move on.
OK.
All right, so this is our model.
I do want to change this a bit.
Well, maybe not yet.
OK.
So daylighting, daylighting and energy plus,
there are a couple of different daylighting objects
in energy plus.
We have combined them a little bit in EP3.
And the way you access them is you actually go into your floor.
I'm going to toggle off the exterior geometry.
And then if you right-click on a floor surface
and you can say Add a Daylight Sensor.
And you can just locate a sensor on the face.
And right now we just have one per space.
But if we want to, we can put a few more in.
So maybe the space has two.
And EP3 will figure out what the coordinates are,
the X and Y coordinates.
And then when we go to our selected object dialog,
we have some information about this exact daylighting
reference point.
So the daylighting daylight sensing system
is made up of these daylight reference points.
They each have an X, Y, and Z coordinate.
You can change the sensor height.
Right now the sensor height default is 0.8 meters.
Switching the units works, right?
OK.
It's still giving us the default in meters.
But you can change the sensor height to be something else.
So if we wanted to make it three feet,
and then we refresh the view, the Z coordinate reference
point is now three feet.
You can also indicate the fraction of the lights
controlled by the reference points.
So there are two reference points in this particular space.
So I'm going to set it at 0.5 and this one 0.5.
And we can set the illuminance at the reference point as well.
If we look at the space, once we've added
daylighting controls, this daylighting controls additional
information comes up, and we can fill out all of these values.
And it also tells us that we have two daylighting reference
points in this space.
And we've come a delighting method.
We can select an availability schedule.
So is this available all the time,
or is this only available certain hours of the year?
Lighting control type could be continuous or stepped.
And then there are a whole bunch of other parameters
and details.
So none of these are bold and bold.
So there's a whole bunch of parameters and details.
They're not actually required in order to run the simulation.
So we can see if in the input-output reference,
let's take a look for dealing controls.
So we can get a little bit more information about each of these
fields and exactly how they're used.
So availability schedule main.
OK, this field is optional.
And it's used to tell whether or not the control is available.
If the field is left blank, controls are always available.
And it's also telling you about how that schedule is going to be used.
So tomorrow we're going to talk a lot about schedules.
We're going to put together some really detailed custom schedules.
We're going to talk about all the different types of schedules,
the different ways that schedules are used.
A ton of stuff in energy plus is driven by schedules.
OK, so let's take a look at how this looks.
I think.
OK, so when we look at the idea, we now have a number of schedules.
We now have a daylighting controls object.
And we have a first daylighting reference point
and a second daylighting reference point.
Let's see, I'm doing this a little bit off the cuff,
so let me know what specific questions about daylighting
you're looking to have answered.
And I can maybe, if they got a little bit more
information, a little bit more specific information.
But that, in general, is how you add daylighting to an EP3 model
and how you control or where you go to change the inputs related
to daylighting controls.
So I think there was also a question about shading.
Yes, I asked that there was any particular type of shaving.
I didn't get an answer yet because there
are numerous types of shading objects.
Yeah, so in EP3 right now, we're supporting two major types
of shading objects.
There's building shading and there's sight shading.
So building shading is anything that's attached to the building
and will rotate with the building when this North
axis parameter is changed.
So if you're running a, I know the lead baseline models,
you're supposed to run them without shading.
But if you were changing the axis of the building
and you wanted your shading objects
to change with that rotation, you
would create a building shading object.
If you were modeling shading because it's an adjacent building,
you would want that to be a sight shading object.
Now, EP3 will detect like a roof overhang.
So if this roof is overhanging, and we can refresh the geometry
assignments, this object is now recognized as a shading object.
And you can assign a transmit and schedule
which says how much light gets through over the course of the year.
This is really good for modeling trees with, yes, deciduous trees
where you have leaves in summer.
You don't have them in the winter time.
But this is a building shading object because it's a piece of roof.
So anytime you model a roof with an overhang,
all of those overhang pieces automatically get turned into shading.
If you want to model some more detailed shading,
we can add sight shading.
So let's turn this on.
And this is basically just a SketchUp object
where you are free to draw and use SketchUp pretty much like normal.
So we had an adjacent building here.
And we don't need all these back surfaces because that won't affect the shading.
But let me just keep that front surface.
This.
This is a sight shading object where we have a transmit and schedule
and a set of vertices.
For building shading, it works exactly the same way
except we want a building shading object.
And then we can draw in to UP3.
And create some shading.
So this is if you want to do very detailed shading type of objects.
We're also giving you access to some of the...
No, I mean we're not.
No, right, see.
There we go.
So we have given you access to a shading overhang object.
But this is not particularly intelligent in UP3.
I would recommend instead drawing your shading this way.
There are also some interior, let's see, interior lines.
You can also, using constructions and materials, create window blinds
that are movable and controllable.
So we see window material shade.
So basically you would create a shade layer with solar
and solar transmit and solar reflectance, et cetera.
And I think this might be a better topic.
This part like using movable shades would be a better topic
to put on the list for our special topics for day eight
because this is not going to be able to be specific enough to be useful
in the next couple of minutes about this.
Could you discuss something simple?
But a question.
I mean, we're watching you interact with this very easily.
Obviously you've been using this for a long time.
But for those of us that are new, I think that the first thing is
you really need to have a three-button mouse.
It is helpful to have a three-button mouse, but it is not necessary.
You can zoom in and out with the scroll bar.
That's very helpful.
If that doesn't work, there are a lot of tools up here on the toolbar.
And I will send you the link.
We have sourced some SketchUp tutorials that other people have done
that give a really good introduction to SketchUp tools.
We didn't recreate that because there are so many tutorials out there
that are really, really good.
But just the basic navigation in SketchUp, if you're not familiar with SketchUp,
it makes sense to spend an hour or so going through and say,
okay, how do I use the line tool?
How do I pan?
How do I zoom?
But yes, if you don't have a scroll bar, you can use this magnifier zoom
and click and drag to zoom.
You can also use shortcut keys.
So part of the reason it's so smooth is that Z gets you zoom.
So if I want to zoom, you can zoom magnify.
If I want to pan, the shortcut is H, which gives you this little hand
where you can pan.
If you want to orbit, the shortcut is O.
And one of the two tutorials that I will send you for homework
is really geared towards people who are new in SketchUp
where I either click and select or I tell you,
okay, now I'm pressing R for rectangle.
Now I'm pressing L for line.
And now I'm going to draw this way.
So I think, yeah, so it's one of the two tutorials.
I think it's about, I think it's called Creating Complex Roof Shapes.
And it's about an hour long.
It's kind of, it's a longer video, but it takes you step by step
in using the SketchUp tools with EP3.
So I'm not trying to gloss over it, but I think that is the sort of
learning that's better to do at your own pace
rather than in a session like this.
I think it's more useful to talk about technical skills.
Yeah, so my point there is that it's the same controls
as general SketchUp modeling in EP3.
Yes, there are, there, there's really nothing custom
about drawing an EP3.
Okay.
All the ways that you select, move, draw.
When you paint, when you change your, when you change your
constructions and you paint a material, you're just using
the native SketchUp tool to paint that surface.
And then EP3 is saying, okay, what, you know,
what color is the surface and is there an EP3 construction
associated with it?
Okay, so we've had a couple of questions come in.
I think we have time for one of them.
The other one may be best for the forum.
So the question I think we have time for is also,
could you please talk about how to model electrochromic glazing?
Ah, okay.
So, electrochromic glazing.
What's that?
What is it called?
Window, window, interior.
So there's thermochromic glazing available in EnergyPlus.
I might need to get back to you on exactly how we model with this.
That's free, that's fair enough.
And then along in that same question was, and movable shading.
Yep.
That seems a little bit.
Yeah, it's, it's a bit of a longer topic.
It's, yeah, it's a bit of a longer topic.
So I can either put together a short video on it or we can save it for day eight.
Yeah, let me take a look.
If I can fit it into like a five minute video, I'll put together a supplemental video.
And if I can't, then we'll consider it for a day eight topic.
Okay, makes sense.
And then the other question was regarding troubleshooting a file that would not generate results.
I think that's best addressed in the forum because that, that could take some time and may require a file share.
Yeah, so there is, there is one participant who I had a meeting with earlier today because there's a EP3 is not quite finding the results files the way that it should.
And yes, so I, I appreciate that question.
And yeah, I will be in touch further out that issue.
Okay, have not been able to recreate it on on our test machine.
So yeah, working on it.
Yeah, but feel, feel free to reach out to me about about any questions.
Form is great, because we can share information, but you're also welcome to send me an email and ask these questions.
Okay, great.
And then do we want to highlight the homework that is adjacent to this lesson.
Before we, we quit.
Yes. Okay, so we sending an email out in a few minutes.
I'll be linking to tutorials, they both go in detail about how to create detailed building geometry.
So that is how you draw a floor plan and how you trace over floor plans.
So let's see in this file.
In this file, we have down here underneath our regular building geometry, we have floor plans and elevations.
And if I turn them on, you can see that I have.
I may have also used Sketchup to hide this.
So I have a floor plan, which inside turn.
We turn off my upper layers and I go into the ground floor.
You can see that my outline here.
Sorry, one, one piece of advice is that having the selected object dialogue open while you're drawing will make everything a little bit laggy.
It's one area of EP3 where we're working on some performance updates, but for now, in order to have it be reliable, this is a little bit slow.
So as you're drawing, we recommend that you close out the selected object.
But as you can see, the floor plan that we have in this EP3 model aligns really, really well with the EWG floor plan that we imported.
So the first tutorial, which is a multi-family drawing detailed geometry and the multi-family building will take you through and show you how we created this model.
So there's floor plans and also some elevations, which...
One of the features in EP3, I'll just show this to you, but the tutorials that are coming your way will show you how to do this.
We can align an elevation with a particular face.
So when we imported this elevation, we associated it with this south face.
And one of the things is that as you're tracing over the elevation, we have a south face here and a south face here and a south face here.
And we can move this drawing simply by telling it to snap elevation to that face.
And then it's quite easy to figure out the window locations.
I would love to show you in live because it's quite exciting, but I've opted to share the video instead because everybody goes at a different pace.
Some of you are going to watch it in, you know, three quarter time and some of you may be watching it in one and a half time and then pausing and rewatching where you need to.
And I think this is one of those things where if I have a bunch of people following along in their own computer and everybody's going at a different pace, it's not the optimal use of our time.
So yeah, really excited for you to dig in with those two tutorials, but they will show you how to choose trees floor plan.
Yep.
What is the source of the elevation there?
So these are so the two tutorials use two different types of files.
So in this particular file, these, these are, I get my D and WG or a DX app, but got imported.
So CAD files.
And in the other tutorial, we actually just for short, they're the cleanest, they're the prettiest or the, in some ways, they're the easiest to trace.
But in other ways, sometimes there's so many lines that it's a little bit annoying.
You kind of too much information.
So sometimes I'll just bring in a, an image file.
So the second, the second tutorial, which is on creating a more complex roof shape uses image files and it's a kind of a, it's kind of a funny historical building and made up an end use for it.
But it's an, it's an interesting building shape.
It's an interesting use case.
It has a couple of exterior walls that are at different angles.
It's got like a little turret.
So, yeah, we'll take you through creating a much more complex roof shape, although the building doesn't have all that many zones.
So, yeah, in one, we're, we're working with CAD files and the other we're working with drawn files are going through the same process of associating a file with a floor tracing floor plans and then associating elevation files with a particular elevation and, and doing elevation drawings that way.
If you're new in SketchUp, I would, I will tell you which one to recommend if you're new in SketchUp, probably the, the complex roof shape.
It's the building is a little bit more, the building shape is a little bit more complex, but the way I've gone through the tutorial is, is slower.
And I give every single click, give the detail of what I'm doing with each click.
So, yeah, please use the forum for discussion and questions and reach out to me if you have more urgent needs.
Okay, I'm just making sure we have a backup of our chat.
It doesn't always export right when, when we save that to the webinar.
Okay, so no other questions here.
Appreciate everyone if you're following along.
Good job.
And what's the topic for tomorrow?
Tomorrow, we are talking about internal loads, managing internal loads and we'll revisit the zones versus spaces question.
And we'll get into a lot of details about schedules and some kind of more advanced topics relating to schedules.
So you're actually going to do something with a schedule that most people might do with some custom programming.
Yes, I'm excited to show you that.
Great.
Schedules are highly important and appreciate everyone for tolerating the audio issues.
We're going to think about what's causing that.
It probably is something to do internally with Zoom, but we might be able to prevent that.
Yesterday, the audio was great.
And today there was some, some odd feedback that I'll have to think about if there's anything we can do.