I'm starting to look into which product from IES my company will buy. Looking through the white paper a couple questions came to mind. We are an Arch & Engineering firm and want to use some sort of energy analysis very early on and continue throughout the project.
1. It says plenum spaces should be created as seperate rooms. Does this mean the area above a dropped ceiling? It is my understanding that ceilings don't divide spaces when exported to gbXML. So I've been leaving the ceilings out of my test model. Will the analysis be better with ceilings and plenums taken into account? I imagine this reduces the conditioned space the VE toolkit or <VE> thinks there is.
If I do have a dropped ceiling and create a room for a plenum do I then have to create a ceiling level and a "ceiling" made out of the floor or roof tool?
2. When I create custom doors and windows what criteria does gbxml or IES's products use in determining what is glazing vs solid. Is it based on the transparency of the material or the subcategory?