Hi everyone, I hope you are doing well,
does the HB+EP uses the exact Floor area in the energy model as it is in shown in LabelZones Component?
as many of you know, tools like DesignBuilder show occupied floor area of the model a bit less than its apparent measurements according to the thickness of the walls,
does that happens in HB+EP models as well?
Thanks in advance
Hi @Nimafo ,
Essentially, all of honeybee legacy expects to use gross floor area for everything as opposed to net floor area, which has the wall thickness subtracted from it (and possibly some furniture depending upon how you define it). So you should typically build your honeybee energy models to the exterior side of a wall if it has an Outdoors boundary conditions and to the center-line of the wall if it has a Surface (interior) boundary condition.
Using this “gross floor area approach” is the recommended practice for how to set up geometry for energy models and I know that it’s also the assumption that underlies all of the floor-normalized loads (eg. lighting W/m2) in the template programs that come with honeybee.
However, we realize that getting the net floor area with the wall thicknesses subtracted from it is helpful for a lot of cases, especially for people who like to define their loads in terms of net floor area instead of gross floor area. We don’t plan on implementing methods to get the net floor area in the legacy plugin but we have an open issue for it with the new [+] plugins, which we plan to address soon:
2 Likes