Lighting Analysis Including Unoccupied Spaces

[Anonymous]

I am trying to run a lighting analysis for my project. I get results saying that the Attic Floor is outside of the threshold, which shouldnt matter because there are no regularly occupied spaces in the Attic. I have unchecked "include in daylighting analysis" for all the rooms in the attic using the Lighting Analysis Room Schedule. Then reloaded the analysis. However, now when i go to the Floor Schedule, it says there is still 2,000sf of 6,000sf being included in the analysis. Some of the rooms are still displaying with colors on the floor plans but the rooms are unchecked. Why is this happening? It also seems like the total floor areas of all my levels are higher than they actually are. Any ideas?

UPDATE: When i sort and group the rooms in the "Lighting Analysis Room Schedule" and calculate totals, the Attic has 4,000 square feet. But the "Lighting Analysis Floor Schedule still lists 6,000sf. Where is this extra 2,000sf coming from? Thickness of walls? Is there a way to turn that off? Its hard to tell if this is skewing my results or not. Thanks!

[Anonymous]

UPDATE UPDATE: It appears it was a phasing issue. Revit was calculating all of the existing rooms along with new construction. I set the room schedule to existing phase, unchecked all the rooms, and now the attic appears correctly. will do this for the rest of the floors as well. If anyone has a different solution please post it!

[Anonymous]

While i solved the issue of the colors showing on the floor plan, the "Floor Schedule" that Revit creates still gives inaccurate results. The level has under 6,000sf of new rooms, when you total the rooms in new construction on the room schedule....but the floor schedule reports over 9,000sf. 

Is there a way to run the analysis based only on new construction rooms and not existing? If I could run only the new construction rooms I would not be charged credits for the anaylsis. As it is, to run the analysis I would be charged credits for rooms i dont even need.

I realize this thread has become a mess...but each time i update i seem to find a solution for the previous issue. Thanks again

[rds3000 · Accepted solution]

Hey Chris.

The analysis is done based on Floor elements on selected Levels.  So for your credit rate, the Rooms shouldn't matter, only the Floors.

As far as the multiple area counting, that's where Rooms matter.  The Include in Daylighting parameter should work well to ignore Rooms in the other phases for the total, but you're right that we do not respect phase for the Floor Schedule totals.  Normally we do not see multiple Rooms defined in the same place in a model, but I see it's an issue in your case. 

In any case, you should be able to use the Room schedule and Plan views to do your design analysis and LEED reporting, and manually filter out the Rooms in the other phases.  However, the best idea is to copy your model and remove the Rooms in phases other than the one you are analyzing.

I'll put this issue on the list for improvements in a coming release update.

David

[rds3000]

One other thing to mention is that there is a bug that fails to exclude elements in non-Visible Worksets.  It may be that you have a hidden Workset in the model with more Floors on those Levels.

And on controlling credit costs, make sure that if you have modeled the Floors in layers (eg structural and finish), to join the layers so they create only one set of analysis points.

David

[Anonymous]

Thanks David! I actually had two floors modeled on every level (a workaround I was using to create a new finish layer without demoing the whole floor), deleting this seems to have helped. Phasing would definitly be a huge help for future updates. It would be a real pain to detach a central model any time we want to run a daylight analysis, but we try to minimize the number of times we run those any way so for now that will have to do. 

Thanks again!

[rds3000]

OK, glad it works.
Normally you can Join the finish and subfloor, and that will make Lighting
recognize it as a single object.
David

[Anonymous]

David -

I am having a similar issue to Chris where you mentioned:

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Normally we do not see multiple Rooms defined in the same place in a model, but I see it's an issue in your case. 

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I am analyzing an apartment building where we currently have rooms set up for each unit, ignoring interior walls, that are tagged on our larger plans. I placed these rooms on the Primary Design Option and created a new Design Option for Daylighting rooms only. These rooms were created with Room Separation Lines and were made only in Occupied Spaces. They cannot reside in the same Design Option as the other rooms or else the unit calculations would be off.

It would be wonderful if Insight would recognize only those rooms for Daylighting. Currently it calculates them as "0" for everything since the main model has the unit rooms calculated and through no combination of "Include in Daylighting" or Design Option, etc. will they calculate properly.

When is this new release expected?! 

[rds3000]

Yes indeed.
The new approach, which we hope to release soon, is to use the Rooms in the
same Phase and Design Option as the _Insight Lighting Model View.
As it is now, the safest way is to have only one set of Rooms, as the
iterator will distribute analysis points to whatever Room it encounters
first.
David