Knowledgebase
EnergyPlus Zone Floor Area and Volume Checking
Posted by Andy Tindale on 02-Dec-19 09:34 AM
When writing out zone floor area and volume settings to the EnergyPlus input data, DesignBuilder uses the geometry convention settings described in the Geometry convention template help section. This ensures that the real usable floor area and actual zone air volume are used in the simulation. In many cases these values will be less than the values that EnergyPlus estimates when carrying out its input checking which is based only on the 2-D surfaces that make up the zone geometry. You will therefore often see warnings generated in the error file such as:
 
** Warning ** Entered Zone Volumes differ from calculated zone volume(s).
** ~~~ ** ...use Output:Diagnostics,DisplayExtraWarnings; to show more details on individual zones.
 
You can safely ignore these warnings.