Question-and-Answer Resource for the Building Energy Modeling Community
 | 1 | initial version |
Sub-surfaces in EnergyPlus should be rectangles or triangles. I didn't realize we stop the IDF from making sub-surfaces that would fail in EnergyPlus, but it looks like we do. That is why you don't see it in your IDF.
The surface search in SketchUp plugin does also work on sub-surfaces. It lets you set the max number of vertices to allow without a warning. This wouldn't catch a non orthogonal four sided sub-surface which I think is also invalid in E+. I doubt we even check for that in translator.
If you delete the sub-surface in SketchUp. double click it so you also get the edges. If it is a door, un-check the bottom edge of the door before you delete so you don't mess up your base surface.
A measure could very easily be written to find and remove these windows, and with a little more would could try to replace it with a new valid sub-surface that has the same area.
