Add 2 blind materials on a window in Honeybee

grasshopper honeybee
#1

Hi everyone,

I want to have 2 exterior blinds on windows, with different slat angles, that would have complementary schedule (when one is on, the other one is off).

It was possible to stack shading systems in Honeybee legacy with the “Honeybee_EnergyPlus window shade generator” as mention in this other topic here and get this result, but now, only one shading system can be added with the “HB window construction” component and they cannot be stacked.
I cannot use the "window dynamic construction " as it does not work with shaded window constructions.

How can I deal with this issue with the new version of Honeybee?
I saw that I can create the shade manually with the component “HB add shades”, but the properties options are limited.
Is that something that could be implemented in the future? or is it not compatible with the new structure of the LBT?

Best,

Elie

#2

Just to add to @Elie_MED question, can it be done with the SDK?

-A.

#3

Hi @Elie_MED ,

There’s always a way to do it if you’re motivated enough but this “crisscrossing blinds” scenario is definitely far from a typical workflow and so I hope you don’t mind that we made this particular use case a little harder to do in order to make it easier for people to set up more typical cases with windows containing one blind.

Probably the easiest way do assign two blinds is just with some additional IDF strings. You can make these strings manually or you can use the current components and SDK to help you.

The HB Blind component will already output the IDF text for your second blind material. So you can connect that straight into add_str_. To get the WindowShadingControl object, you can create a WindowConstructionShade and then use the LBT SDK in a GHPython component to generate WindowShadingControl strings for each window. Here is the method that you will want to call in the WindowConstructionShade class to get the IDF string for WindowShadingControl.

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#4

I should also note that you can set up these shade geometries explicitly with the HB Louver Shades component and then you can just use transmittance schedules to turn each of them on/off.

The simulation time would be longer but this is a way of avoiding the LBT SDK or the need to use additional strings.

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#5

Hi @chris ,

Thank you very much for your answer !

I perfectly understand that the new construction structure does not allow to define “crisscrossing blinds” easily, I just wanted to be sure.

I am actually working with the SDK (I only use Grasshopper for tests), it seems that using the string generated by the WindowShadingControl object will be the easiest to implement.