Dear all, I’d like to hear your comments and advice regarding the way to summarize and report energy simulation results.
EnergyPlus produces a huge amount of outputs for a lot of variables, down to each zone and surface in various time steps, depending on the specification. It is therefor quite important to summarize and report the results in a clear and concise way, and this always depends on what questions we ask, on which level and to what extent of details. We want to get dig out the most important information without been consumed by the sea of data.
The following images are some initial thinking on how to organize the various type of data and charts that can be produced by Honeybee+Ladybug for various type of analysis in different scales or scopes. It is not intended to be comprehensive, and import items might be missing here of course.
The data/charts are grouped by spatial scale (building or zone, although surface can be included as well), temporal scale (yearly, monthly, hourly) and type of quantity (energy consumption, EUI, energy balance, or individual output variables).
The index for each data/chart corresponds to the index of the GH component block shown in the demo file attached which of course might not represent the only way or the most efficient way to do these calculation or chart generation.
The charts with “?” are the ones I haven’t figured out the way to generate … which may turn out to be easy for experts here…(I was bugging Chris in the last few days).
The most import data/charts to report are highlighted in yellow, and of course it may vary depending on the objectives of the study.
I’d very much appreciate your suggestions and advice!
I have just started performing energy simulations with the grasshopper. I have been struggling to understand the idf result file, for instance, InteriorLights:Electricity:Zone:ZONE_370 and others. (I have attached my output file for your kind reference)
I was going through the questions posted by you in past and thought that you might help. I would extremely appreciate it if you could share some reference material for interpreting the honey bee energy simulation outputs.
Also, I hope that the file attached by you might help me a bit.
Hi @ValG, I haven’t use the EnergyPlus related functions of Ladybug+Honeybee for quite a while, and I’m a bit busy currently working on other projects. So, I apologize in advance that I’m unable to help you directly now.
I’d suggest you the following to get more specific help, which was how I get useful help from this community:
make your question as specific as possible, e.g. “What are the components included in the internal loads calculation?”, “What is the EnergyPlus output variable that will tell me the electricity used for ventilation fan?”, etc. A general question may only invite general suggestions.
show what homework you have done to find answers to these questions by yourself so far.
post a minimum viable example GH file, together with necessary test data, that can replicate the problem you encountered so that other users can have a more direct understanding on how the problem happens, and offer their suggestions/solutions using the example file.
