1.6.0 - Questions regarding new Benefit component and workflow

Hello,

I’ve been testing the new release (super excited, thank you all for all the work throughout the years!). Some things are not clear to me when it comes to new LB Benefit Sky Mtx component and workflow using it. @chris I think you are the author of component, I hope you do not mind me tagging you here. I created a script with “new” and “old” workflow to compare the results. All components used are v1.6.0. I attach it here for reference.

1-6-0_Benefit_test.gh (109.5 KB)

  • Bal_temp and Bal_offset inputs - While first one is self-explainatory i had a small problem with the second one. I wanted to calculate Solar benefit when temperatures are <12C (helpful radiation) and >16C (harmful radiation). First thing I input 12 in Bal_temp and 4 in Bal_offset. It seems that offset works “both sides” though - through trial and error I found out the (probably) correct way of achieving 12-16 balance range is to input 14C in Bal_temp and 2C in Bal_offset.
    Is that right? If I may sugest - a clarification on component input tooltip would be helpful here.

  • In the old workflow, as seen in hydrashare example there seems to be a small typo - it says “subtract helpful from harmful” while the script goes the other way. It always seemed logical to me that the higher the resultant value is, the better. I think the same typo is here, although i cannot see the entire script.
    Once again, through trial and error, I found out that in fact the results closest to new components output is when I subtracted harmful from helpful. With EPW I used, there are very small differencies between “old” and “new” workflow results (around 2 kWh/m2 per face, it can be seen in the posted script).
    Is that the right interpretation? Where do differences come from? A component tooltip saying, for example, that positive values are beneficial and negative are harmful would clarify a lot in my opinion :).

Thank you in advance for your time and help!

@Wujo ,

I’m really sorry that I missed seeing this a few months ago but it looks like you figured it all out since both of your interpretations are correct. I have taken your advice and added a note to the component description that positive values are helpful and negative values are harmful:

If you find any other issues in the component descriptions or the latest sample files, let me know and I will fix them.

The reason why the values are slightly different than Legacy is because of the reason I described here:

Essentially, the new radiation components are a little more accurate in the way that they try to account for ground-reflected solar energy.

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