Modelling terraced houses

[JamesLeeson]

What is the best way to model a terraced home so that you accurately model its heating energy use?

As far as I'm aware you can make the buildings either side into adjacent buildings but this results in an adiabatic boundary between the houses. I'm trying to make the model as accurate as possible and I'm sure that a mid-terrace house benefits from having houses either side so I wondered if there was any way of more accurately modelling its heating energy use?

I have also tried modelling 3 houses then selecting only the rooms of the middle house. I then obtained results from the sensible heating load function in vista. This resulted in slightly less energy use as I would expect but due to my inexperience with IES I'm not sure whether it is an accurate way of obtaining results.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

James

[PCully]

The adiabatic boundary between spaces you are interested in studying and those you aren't has been a standard way of modelling this kin of scenario for a while and it I think it gives a good enough representation but we often advise if you need that extra level of detail then model the immediately surrounding rooms in more detail as well, especially if you are interested in the effects they have on each other.

You can model as much of the building as you like of course but for most engineers I guess it's the balance between time (to build and set up the model as well as running sims) Vs the accuracy. If you are at a point where your new with the software and have some time you could try building up the model to different levels of detail and see what the experience is like and what kind of results variation you see.

Phil

[JamesLeeson]

I have a bit of time so would like to try to get it in as much detail as possible.

What I have done therefore is modeled the surrounding rooms to the same level of detail as I have done with the house I want the results for. What I have then done is run the simulation for the 3 houses and then selected only the rooms of the middle house. In this scenario the results I can look at in vista are restricted so the results I have used are from the space conditioning sensible function. Is this the right way to go about it? i.e. does the space conditioning sensible function give the heating energy used by the selected rooms?

This is probably a really basic question so sorry about that but I have had to teach myself the software and haven't been able to find exactly what each function in vista represents.

Also sorry for posting in 3 of the forums but I wasn't sure which 1 was the best for my question as it contains elements relevant to modeling, apache simulation and the results in vista.

James

[PCully]

Vista user guide will describe the different variables you have access to. You will be slightly restricted in some of the model level variables since they will include for the adjacent rooms as well but one trick to get past that would be to assign a different system to the rooms you are interested in, then in Vista switch to system results and select that system so you get the "system" level results and it will exclude the other rooms.

Phil