I’m trying to understand the effect of having a house built into a hillside on total energy costs. I designated the underground walls (dark yellow), but when I toggle them to normal walls, there is no change in total energy. This makes me think designating them as “underground” has no effect. How come? and how do I model it so I can see the effect of underground walls?
Legacy was really weird. I think there used to be a separate property for whether the type of Surface was an underground wall but this didn’t change the boundary condition to actually be Ground.
We did away with this in the LBT plugin in that there’s no surface type for underground wall and the way that you make something underground is just by changing the boundary condition. We even have this new HB Custom Ground component that lets you use a custom surface to determine what is in contact with the ground and below it.
You can see it mentioned briefly here in this video:
Long story short, the key thing is that you need to change the boundary condition to be Ground if you want to see a noticeable change.
And I highly recommend upgrading from Legacy to the LBT plugin when you get the chance since it’s much better in a lot of ways.
Hey thanks Chris. I have wanted to upgrade, but I could not find many training videos or manuals for the new Honeybee. Even on the paid subscription learning website. Do you have recommendations for learning materials, or does it just need messing with to figure out how it works?
Hopefully my post above answered two questions, then. The playlist to which that the video belongs is the first ~4 hour series we released on how to do energy modeling with the LBT Honeybee plugin (just released this past week). We also have a few other playlists there (many of them done by the awesome, @Janki ):
There should hopefully be ~8 more hours of LBT energy modeling content available on that YouTube channel in the next week or so.
