Question-and-Answer Resource for the Building Energy Modeling Community
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HI @pep4life
I noticed similar issues with a few of my models previously. In my experience, the surface intersect /matching measures work well only when the geometry is very precisely drawn. Snapping to points in Sketchup can get slightly off if enough care isn't taken while drawing and this often results in very small offsets between adjacent surfaces. They are hard to catch but can be noticed when you zoom in really close to the edges. Hence it is very important to pay close attention to snapping in Sketchup when you draw geometry. If I run into similar issues with surface intersection, I usually check for such offsets and redraw these zones/surfaces. Of course, it is tedious and time taking but I can't think of an automated way to correct these manual drawing errors. Did you check to see if all the edges exactly aligned with each other for the surfaces that are having these issues?
If the surface intersection issues are still not resolved after redrawing, the last resort is to take the model to energy plus (or openstudio app) and run it to find the culprit surfaces that would prevent the model from running. This is not the most perfect way of troubleshooting as certain surfaces may remain unmatched but the model might still run. I would suggest doing this only if you are sure that the surfaces that have matching issues are extremely small and you are sure that their impact would be negligible. If your model runs without errors or warnings and you are comfortable with the matching to a reasonable extent, you should be fine. Surface related errors would not be introduced when you add systems, etc.
Hope that helps!
PS: The outside boundary condition of building surface can either be another surface or outdoors (or any of the other options available). This doesn't change based on the which side you are looking at.
