Fwd: SPOT - first trial

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Sep 4, 2015, 4:20:50 PM9/4/15
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From: SPOT Support <sp...@daylightinginnovations.com>
Date: Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 1:37 PM
Subject: Re: SPOT - first trial
To: "Jones, Christopher" <Christoph...@wspgroup.com>


Hi Christopher,

My apologies for the delayed response, have been juggling a number of things this week.  Answers below:

1.    Spatial Characteristics: how do the roof and wall thicknesses affect the simulation?

They will reduce the effective transmittance through a window or skylight.  The thicknesses are modeled dynamically in Radiance.  It is important to model this as wall and skylight shaft depths really do impact the amount of daylight.

2.    Apertures and Objects: what are “Blocks”? (maybe interior objects – desks, induction units under the windows, semi high partitions, etc.)

Blocks can be used to model many things - I have used them for interior desks, book shelves, cubicle walls etc... inside as well as overhangs, fins, building self-shading and shading from exterior buildings.

3.    Report Type: when I select LEED v4.0 as the Report Type, the Input Notification states, “The setup criteria for the selected report type have been entered.  This includes work plane height, spacing, wall offset requirements.  These values are located on the Advanced Options page and should be checked to ensure the grid spacing is not too small for the space size” – I click OK.  On the Geometry Input Page, I select “Advanced Options”, the Advanced Options page does not include inputs for “includes work plane height, spacing, wall offset requirements”?

Hmmm..I just tested this out again and for it did enter 2.00 for the Field Point Spacing and Field Wall Spacing inputs on the Advanced Options page and it entered 2.5ft for the workplane height on the Geometry page, as expected.  I am using the latest v4.74 released.  Please check again and let me know if you still don't see these inputs update.

4.    The LEED 2009 Report Type gives the same notification. Again, the Advanced Options page does not provide inputs for “work plane height, spacing, wall offset requirements”.

 I tried this one too and got 5.00 ft for both Field Point Spacing and Field Wall Spacing inputs and 3 as the Design Time Step and 2.5 as the workplane.  Try again and let me know.

5.    Selecting Spot Daylighting Performance does not produce the notification.  The Advanced Options page is the same as with the previous two items.

 The SPOT Daylighting Performance report does not require specific prerequisites as it is meant to be a more robust metric report applicable to different space sizes, types, and schedules by using different parameters.

6.    Manual 5.1 Site and Climate Selection.  The last sentence in the first paragraph states, “A larger database including all the new updated TMY3 weather data is available on the SPOT website and available for download” – I could not find a link for downloading weather data on the website. 

 You are the first to ask for this - you can download it here.  https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/14937994/Additional_Locations.rar  I will post it to the website soon.  My manual got ahead of my website maintenance ;-)  To use, just copy all the files are the ones you are interested in to the C:\SPOT\weather\ directory.  From then on, those locations should appear in the SPOT pull down menus under SPOT generic.

7.    Convert EPW File: I selected the San Jose TMY3 EPW file and received a warning, “WARNING! It appears that a process is still running…..”.  I selected Proceed Anyway.  It appears to have converted the weather file successfully – the program shelled to DOS and ran a series of calculation. 

Ahha - there is a bug with that message.  I just tried the same thing, downloaded the San Jose airport EPW and imported and got the Warning!.  The conversion did work (you can check by looking at the C:\SPOT\weather\Additional_Locations folder) and it is just the message that is in error.  This message is intended for Next buttons when calculations are still running and somehow it is showing up here.  To be fixed in v5.0...

8.    4.1 Import Luminaires – this section states I need a IES file as well as a .rad and .dat file.  How does one get the .rad and .dat files for a particular luminaire?

By importing an IES file, SPOT uses a Radiance program called IES2Rad to convert this data into the two files needed for Radiance: a rad file that describes the physical geometry and can adjust overall output and color and a dat file that just contains normalized distribution data.  All you need is to import the IES files, the rad and dat files should just sit behind the scenes.

Regards,
Zack 



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