profiles not read correctly by IES<VE>

[PNengineer]

Has anyone else faced this problem, namely gains profiles not being read correctly by the simulator? I had prepared close to realistic usage profiles for lighting and equipment based on the general philosophy that 100% lights or eqt on for one hour equals to 50% lights/eqt on for two hours etc. However, when checking the lighting and eqt gains after the sim run for various zones, I get results that do not match my input calculations. I then tried and changed one profile that had the hours and intensity distributed over the 24-hour period into an equivalent block of hours with 100% intensity, and bam! the results match my calculations! This means that something is wrong with the way the profile is read when it is not at 100% intensity. I encourage other users to check a few values before assuming the run to be OK. In my case the gains are consistently less. Therefore, underestimation of internal gains can result.

Does anyone have any experience and/or input how to fix this?

[PCully]

Hi,

I'll be honest I'm a little sceptical when I read something like this...but to give it a fair chance can you please give a little more detail on how you set things up and exactly what results didn't match with what you expected?

I tried a quick test myself:
one room
lighting gain 20 W/sqm
2 different profiles: first on 12-4 100% (1), second on 12-8 50% (0.5)
ran a sim with each and confirmed that my lighting gains followed the profile applied for each sim (look at the daily chart to see the max is different and the profile is on for different periods of time)
also compared annual total lighting gain for both runs and confirmed they both add up to the same

Phil

[PNengineer]

I had done exactly what you did in your test model. I had input a lighting gain that I knew would yield an annual gain of wattage x 5 hrs/d x 356 days (same profile on every day). I then checked the result given by the simulator against that value and as stated earlier, only got the correct answer if I used a profile with 5 hours at 100%. Distributing the intensity over more hours gave erroneous results. Inspired by your reply I performed a similar simple test with 4 rooms and applied the same gain but with different profiles to each room. When I compare the 5 hrs at 100% profile to the 10 hrs at 50% profile, the latter yields half of the annual value of the former. When I view each as a daily graph, the hour distribution appears to be correct but the 50% intensity shows up as half of that, i.e. 25%. Hence the error in the annual result. I had another two rooms with profiles utilising different combinations of 50% and 100% intensities and in each case the 50% is reduced to 25%. I have checked the profiles numerous times, so the error is not there. It appears that the 50% reduction is applied twice but why? Can you think of a source for this error? What am I doing wrong? Many thanks in advance.