Seasonal schedules - Issues in IDF

Hi,
I’m checking IDF definitions for a project I’m doing. Right now I’m dealing with the checking of various schedules I’m defining in LBT.
I’m using seasonal schedules to define winter/summer seasons and for triggering windows shades.
This is the plot for the later in GH (red color is when the shades is On):


You can see that one state runs from January to end of April and again in December. The second state runs from May to end of November.
When i check the Schedule:Year section in the IDF this is what i see:

For some reason the schedules are set to the 25th day of the last month of the states (25th March and 25th November). A couple of groups were added in order to complete the period (say 26th March to April 1st, which is not OK since the period should end on March 31th, but let’s continue).
Now I’m checking the Schedule:Week:Daily section.

From the image we can see that the second group (Object 21 in the section) is setting a different schedule for Saturdays (Schedule Day 2). Also the 4th group (object 23) assigns different schedules for Fridays and Saturdays (should be similar to object 22). And finally, the last group (object 24) is completely different than objects 20 or 21 that represent the same season.
The last thing to check is how those daily schedules are defined. The Schedule:Day:Interval section show the following:

Schedule Day 1 and ShdWinter_Day schedules (Objects16 and 19 in the IDF) define the winter settings while the other 2 the summer.
If we go back to the previous image we can see that there is a mess in the schedules, where sometimes in winter time the summer’s are assigned and for the summer some winter schedules are assigned also.

Hope all this is clear enough to understand the issue. Sorry for the long post.

Hopefully you can help to bring some clarity on this one.

Thanks,
-A.

Hi. @AbrahamYezioro

I have same problem

Did you solve this problem?

Unfortunately not yet.
Still waiting for an answer/explanation here … :worried:
Probably @chris can shade some light on this one.
-A.

Hey @AbrahamYezioro ,

This issue is unfortunatley on OpenStudio’s side and it’s out of our hands. I agree that it’s annoying to get all of these extra little week schedules and I know that its part of some logic in OpenStuido that tries to reconcile the “day of the week” logic with the “start/end date” logic. Granted, the results should all be the same in the end. You’ll see that, if you request the schedule value as an output of EnergyPlus, you’ll get something equivalent to the hourly values that you see in your plot there provided by Honeybee.

But there’s no real way to automatically make the IDF cleaner without trying to engage the OpenStudio developers to make a change to OpenStudio.

I can offer a potential manual fix, though. The “Seasonal Schedule” component has an idf output and this IDF text translation is performed by our methods in Honeybee. You’ll see that the result is a lot cleaner than what OpenStudio gives you:

So you can always manually replace the text in the IDF with the clean text out of the component. Also, note that latest “Seasonal Schedule” component (that you can get with the LB Versioner) has inputs for the summer and winter design day schedules, which can be used to customize those schedules that you highlighted in the IDF Editor, @AbrahamYezioro .

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Thanks @chris for the detailed explanation and alternative solution.
For now i’ll take “your word” that the results won’t change at the end. Editing the IDF is not a real option when you are running a parametrical model … but it is an option to consider for some cases.
I’ll test the SeasonalSchedule.
-A.

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