Time taken for multi-floor multi-zone HB energy models for Peak Heat Gain study

Hey @chris

I’m trying to create a workflow to calculate the Peak Heat Gain in a set of zones, and I’m using the 0.4% cooling design day for the same.

I’ve been testing out the workflow using different configurations for the input geometry. And I’ve been keeping a tab of the time it takes for different levels of complexity of my building.

Single-floor, single-zone model: roughly 2-3 minutes
Single-floor, multi-zone model (~8 zones): 20-25 minutes

Whereas, when I go any more complex than this, say a multi-floor, multi-zone model (~10 zones in total), the “Zone Sizing Simulation” step doesn’t even start even after 2 hours of running. I also kinda monitored the memory consumption and CPU usage on Windows Task Manager, and say 30 minutes into the simulation, the memory consumption just drops to around 40-45 MBs, and the simulation just sits there without going forward. I ended up not finish running any of the multi-floor models because of this :confused:

I’ve made sure to follow most of your tutorials on YouTube and I’ve built the model without any errors.

What could be the reason for this? Could really use some help!

If it’s taking 2-3 minutes to run a single zone energy simulation, either you are using an ancient computer or you dumped a steaming pile of unclean poorly-formatted geometry into E+ and the solar calculation it taking a while.

It’s hard to know which one without more information.