I was wondering is something changed lately with the “HB UTCI Comfort Map” component and specifically the way the e+ steps happen.
I am getting an “…AssertionError: Model contains no Rooms…”. It makes sense to need a room to run some of the steps but I have been using this component for years now purely with HB faces assigned either as faces or shaders in the HB model.
It is a trivial problem, as I can make some of the context is an actual HB Room, or I can have a dummy room to bypass this error. Still if this is not intentional, it would be great to avoid these steps.
Hello Byron!
I found myself within this situation last week and I decided its “more elegant” to make a room out of the ground (as proposed in the “comfort under a tree” sample) rather than the dummy room!. Hope this was useful.
The UTCI map component is supposed to be able to handle cases of no rooms, in which case the surface temperatures of all geometry are assumed to be the temperature of the air.
And the fix should be available via the LB Versioner component in 30 minutes or so.
Adding a room into the model is also a way to work around the issue, @Hector , but EnergyPlus simulations can sometimes be very time consuming with some of the geometry that gets used for outdoor thermal comfort simulations. For this reason, we want to continue bing able to support the option of running the UTCI comfort map without the need for rooms (using only Radiance to evaluate the radiant heat exchange of human subjects with the sky).
