Question-and-Answer Resource for the Building Energy Modeling Community
 | 1 | initial version |
Running the model at different timesteps affects the accuracy of the zone fundamental heat balance, which drives most of what happens in E+. It also affects simulation speed, but that is typically pretty short with the E+ engine these days.
E+ has recommended number of timesteps per hour for different use cases (building w/ HVAC, w/out HVAC, etc.)
You can run the model at different timesteps and you can report the output at different timesteps. Decreasing the timestep interval (increasing the number of timesteps per hour) and reporting loads at the timestep frequency typically increases the peak zone loads reported from the annual weather file runperiod.
