Recently been able to convert Residential Prototype Building Models

I am currently looking at researching controls in residential (single family) buildings and have been having difficulty in obtaining adequate models of enough variety in system types, location, envelope, etc. I was hoping to use the PNNL Residential Prototype Building Models however conversion of them from V5 to V8.9 or higher has been disastrous, first the geometries would not properly convert to closed volumes and now I have been unable to get the conversion applications to run on either Windows (through parallels) or OSX. It seems as though over 2019 people were having similar issues in converting and would be curious if anyone has successfully converting them recently?

Regarding version: I believe they are available (at least the 2018 IECC models) in v8.6 at the following link https://www.energycodes.gov/developme...

Regarding conversion: I encountered the issue you are describing when converting the Single Family models to v9.0 from v8.0 (I took the intermittent step of converting from 8.0 to 8.9 before converting that to 9.0 on the advice of a colleague). I realized that this is caused by the 4 upper basement wall surfaces, which seem to be low enough in height (0.001m) to be considered a degenerate surface - I assumed this gets deleted during the simulation resulting in a zone that is not completely enclosed. Deleting these BGWall_upper_... surfaces from the model and then dropping the floor above (and the lower Z vertices of the walls above) from 0.001m to 0m resolved the issue.

I'm not exactly sure what causes this and actually have not tried to see if this issue exists in the original (non-converted) file.

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jbatt

answered 2020-02-20 16:40:15 -0500, updated 2020-02-20 16:41:02 -0500

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Thank you for the advice. I will try it out.

bchuck (2020-02-20 18:55:56 -0500) edit

Interestingly, I get the enclosure warning between the 1st and 2nd floors, and only for one half of each shared edge (slab; sometimes 1st, sometimes 2nd floor, never both), though the vertices appear identical.