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Adding custom meters in energyplus

asked 2017-01-19 11:30:06 -0500

ivanadriane's avatar

updated 2017-04-02 19:55:47 -0500

I am running into an issue with the energyplus property Meter:Custom. I have a building that has residential portion and commercial - and I am creating two separate meters so that I can assign different rate structures.

The issue I am running into is in creating the residential meter. Essentially in order to create the residential meter I created individual meters for each end use for all my residential thermal zones. I then tried to add all my individual residential end use meters into a custom ResidentialElectric meter. Example below:

Meter:Custom,
  ResidentialLighting,
  Electricity,
  ResZone-1,
  Lights Electric Energy;

Meter:Custom,
  ResidentialRecepticle,
  Electricity,
  ResZone-1,
  Electric Equipment Energy;

Meter:Custom,
  ResidentialHeating,
  Electricity,
  CoilHtg_ResZone-1,
  Heating Coil Electric Energy;

Meter:Custom,
  ResidentialElectric,
  Electricity,
  ,
  ResidentialLights,
  ,
  ResidentialRecepticle,
  ,
  ResidentialHeating;

Now - when checking the mtd file i see that all the variables set in meters ResidentialLighting, ResidentialRecepticle, and ResdientialHeating are all there. But the meter ResidentialElectric is blank - and when output in the meter.csv file shows 0 energy.

My understanding is that a custom meter has the same property as any other meter. I was wondering if anyone has had experience in creating a custom meter that adds other custom meters, or if this is even a possibility.

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7

answered 2017-01-19 12:29:53 -0500

updated 2019-10-31 19:27:06 -0500

I've run into this problem too.

While I don't have an explicit solution to "combine custom meters in another custom meter", you can always add multiple meters under the same custom meter like so:

Meter:Custom,
ResidentialElectric,
Electricity,
ResZone-1,
Zone Lights Electric Energy,
ResZone-1,
Zone Electric Equipment Electric Energy,
CoilHtg_ResZone-1,
Heating Coil Electric Energy,
ResZone-2,
Zone Lights Electric Energy,
ResZone-2,
Zone Electric Equipment Electric Energy,
CoilHtg_ResZone-2,
Heating Coil Electric Energy;

I've written an Edit: OpenStudio BCL Measure to take in a .csv that defines the custom meters and makes meter:custom and output:meter from them.

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Comments

@mdahlhausen - this is also the solution I came up with. I guess "adding custom meters into another custom meter" may not be an option.

ivanadriane's avatar ivanadriane  ( 2017-01-19 12:56:20 -0500 )edit
4

answered 2017-01-20 07:25:17 -0500

updated 2017-01-24 09:22:34 -0500

Currently, a Meter:Custom cannot reference other Meter:Custom objects. We recently addressed an issue in EnergyPlus (see 5118 and 5942) that no longer outputs zero when nested Meter:Custom objects are used and instead issues a warning message and does not produce any output. In addition, the input output reference was updated to make it more explicit that a Meter:Custom cannot reference another Meter:Custom object. This fix will be part of the spring 2017 release of EnergyPlus.

I agree with @mdahlhausen solution, and list all the meters in each custom meter instead.

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2

answered 2023-06-21 02:58:08 -0500

Tokarzewski's avatar

The Meter:Custom can't contain other Meter:Custom but interestingly the Meter:CustomDecrement can contain Meter:Custom

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Asked: 2017-01-19 11:30:06 -0500

Seen: 1,120 times

Last updated: Jun 21 '23