Honeybee-PH Plugin for Passive House Modeling

Hello Ladybug Tools community,

I am excited to let everyone know that we are ready to share the first public version of the new Honeybee-PH v1.0 plugin for Ladybug Tools.

This new LBT plugin is designed to make it easy to utilize LBT models for Passive House design and certification to both the International PHI standard and the US Phius standard. This new plugin replaces the older LBT2PH, and has been re-written from the ground up as a proper plugin for LBT thanks to the assistance of @chris, @mostapha and @TrevorFedyna.

Honeybee-PH allows for users to move their LBT models into either a Passive House Planning Package (PHPP) excel model, or into WUFI-Passive. The plugin also features a host of new tools which allow users to create LBT models with ‘PH-Style’ inputs within Rhino/Grasshopper.

Basic Usage Diagram

Our hope is that this plugin will enable more LBT modelers to utilize tools like PHPP and WUFI-Passive, but also to get more Passive House modelers using the amazing LBT toolkit in place of their existing modeling tools.

As with LBT itself, this project is completely free and open-source, and you should feel free to download the v1 and give it a try if you are interested.

- - DOWNLOAD HONEYBEE-PH INSTALLER FILE - -


Some details:

  • The current version of the Plugin is 1.0, released October 2022
  • You can find the project homepage here, with download links, installation instructions, and more.
  • This is the first ‘public’ release, meaning: The main features and functions are set, but I’m sure there are plenty of bugs and problems yet to be found and fixed. Please do let us know if you run into any trouble, bugs, or confusion.
  • If you have any issues or trouble, check out this Contact page for links and help resources.
  • This plugin is designed to work with the new LBT v1.5+ package. Please note that this plugin will NOT work with the older Ladybug ‘Legacy’ tools.
  • You should run LBT’s ‘Versioner’ tool within Grasshopper before installing Honeybee-PH to make sure you have the latest versions of Ladybug and Honeybee installed.
  • Note: This plugin does not replace the PHPP or WUFI-Passive, it allows you to pass your LBT model data off to PHPP or WUFI-Passive from within Grasshopper. But you’ll still need to have a copy of PHPP or WUFI-Passive to open the exported model once it is created.
  • If you are using Pollination instead of vanilla LBT, you might have some slight hiccups installing this plugin. See the installation page for details, or the installation walk-through video.

Supported Software/Model Versions:

  • PHPP v9.6-SI, 9.7-IP
  • PHPP v10-SI
  • WUFI-Passive 3.2

Requirements:

  • Windows only. We know, we know. It’s a drag. But we just can’t figure out how to make Rhino talk to Excel on MacOS. It’s a permissions issue…
  • Rhino 7+
  • LBT 1.5+

Next Steps:

  • Add Spanish and German language PHPP support
  • Improve testing, validation
  • Add more tutorials, documentation, how-to guides, etc…
  • Build importers (ie: take an existing WUFI-Passive model and create an LBT model from it.)

We’ve been using this plugin within our own office for quite some time now and it has become a core piece of our workflows. Our hope is that other folks might also find these tools helpful, and that plugins of this sort help to build up the LBT ecosystem as a whole.

Of course if you have feedback or want to get in touch, feel free: PHTools@bldgtyp.com
All the best,

@edpmay
The Passive House Tools Project
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21 Likes

This is great @edpmay !
Thanks for share.
-A.

Hi @edpmay ,
Want to report that the installer file is making me trouble. It complains about:

Runtime error (AssertionException): No Python instalation was found at: C:\Users\ayezi\ladybug_tools\python.
This is a requirement in order to contine with installation

Traceback:
line 475, in script

LBT is installed in C:\Program Files\ladybug_tools according to the installation file location. In there it is the python folder.
Am i missing something here?

Thanks,
-A.

FYI: The HBPH installer has been updated to fix this issue for those using the ‘one-click’ LBT installation. Thanks @AbrahamYezioro for bringing it to my attention. The above links should all now get you the updated installer file from now on.

best,
@edpmay

@edpmay amazing! thank you!

Huge! Thank you for including compatibility with both PHPP and WUFI Passive

Hey Ed, Thanks for this. Looking forward to test drive. Getting this error in every component I bring to the canvas.

  1. Solution exception:
    Failed to import honeybee_ph_utils:
    No module named honeybee_ph_utils

Can you suggest what the issue is?

Hello everyone,

I just wanted to post a quick note for anyone that is interested: we have finished updating the HBPH package to run on Rhino 8, and so it should work for anyone who is now using v8.

A couple items:

  • As always, you can download the HBPH ‘installer’ file here: LINK
  • To learn more, feel free to check out the “Learn More” page which has links to various videos and tutorials.
  • In addition to working with Rhino-8, we have also updated the MacOS version to work with the PHPP Excel model now. So if you are on MacOS, you should now be able to write out your project data to PHPP, just like on Windows.

If you have any trouble with this new package installer, feel free to reach out or post to the forum here.

all the best,
@edpmay

5 Likes