Are there any issues with a .epw file having three comment lines?

asked 2024-07-18 19:40:23 -0500

Jamie Sullivan's avatar

updated 2024-07-19 09:57:36 -0500

I've been working with some modified weather files that had a third line of comments added to the header in the epw to describe their changes, increasing the total header lines to 9, e.g.:

HOLIDAYS/DAYLIGHT SAVINGS,No,0,0,0
COMMENTS 1, ...
COMMENTS 2, ...
COMMENTS 3, ...
DATA PERIODS,1,1,TMY3 Year,Sunday,1/ 1,12/31

This will run in EnergyPlus without problems. However, if I pass it through the weather file converter it will drop the third comment line, and looking at the Auxillary Programs documentation it does state that there are only eight lines in the header with two comment lines:

The header information consists of eight lines (keywords): LOCATION, DESIGN CONDITIONS, TYPICAL/EXTREME PERIODS, GROUND TEMPERATURES, HOLIDAYS/DAYLIGHT SAVINGS, COMMENTS 1, COMMENTS 2, and DATA PERIODS. This is followed by the time step data

So, my question is if anyone knows if the files having three lines of comments in them would actually be a problem for anything, given that, as noted, it does still seem to run fine and produce exactly the same results as the file with only two comment lines.

The only problem I've found is that eplusr's read_epw() function can't handle it because it seems to have an expectation of an eight line header hardcoded into it, so potentially there could be other programs out there that have that problem?

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