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Working with a lot of zones more effectively

asked 10 years ago

Dinosaver's avatar

updated 7 years ago

As soon as we finally have a table representation for zone settings it would be great to have an ability to work with it as a table. I mean to sort, select many rows at one time, assign values to all selected zones, search, etc. Huge models such as healthcare are really need it. The same with groups of zones. E+ has an ability to assign an HVAC system to a predefined list of zones, not only adding them one-by-one. Why don't we have the same here?

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is this for OpenStudio?

Benjamin's avatar Benjamin  ( 10 years ago )

@Dinosaver: @Benjamin is right, you should tag this post and perhaps refine the context of the message to reflect the tool(s) you are talking about. I just re-tagged the post by hyphenating some of the keywords for clarity as well. Thanks!

rpg777's avatar rpg777  ( 10 years ago )

@Dinosaver Just to clarify, EnergyPlus supports zone lists for internal gains (People, Lights, etc.), infiltration, zone ventilation, and a few select HVAC-related objects (ZoneControl:Thermostat*, Sizing:Zone, and Controller:MechanicalVentilation). It does not support zone lists for assigning HVAC equipment.

MJWitte's avatar MJWitte  ( 10 years ago )

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answered 10 years ago

updated 10 years ago

OpenStudio 1.5.0 added a grid view of spaces and zones, which makes working with them much easier. The team is working to add "multi-edit" capability to grid view so you can select multiple spaces and zones and make changes to them simultaneously. We had hoped this would be available in January's 1.6.0 release, but will likely show up in 1.7.0.

An example of current capability from the OpenStudio documentation pages:

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Look forward. What about lists of zones?

Dinosaver's avatar Dinosaver  ( 10 years ago )

Here are some additional screenshots of grid view, which includes a few thermal zone views. The "Custom" view lets you create your own custom column list.

David Goldwasser's avatar David Goldwasser  ( 10 years ago )

Thanks for the responses. Is it possible to reduce the text/line size so that we can see more zones on the screen at once. I feel like everything is really large in OS and there is a lot of wasted space in the UI. Not trying to flame, just hopeful that my suggestion can help in a small way.

anonymous userAnonymous ( 10 years ago )

That's great feedback, and we appreciate it! I've passed it along to our UI folks. Curious what platform you're working on. MacOS (shown in the screenshot above) does have looser formatting than the Windows build that results in a lot of wasted space. We already have a ticket in to improve that, but it would be good to know if you think the Windows builds also need tightening.

ljbrackney's avatar ljbrackney  ( 10 years ago )

I've been using the Windows build. Thanks for the response!

anonymous userAnonymous ( 10 years ago )

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Asked: 10 years ago

Seen: 342 times

Last updated: Dec 09 '14