Hourly Results Viewer

The Results Viewer allows you to view and analyse the hourly temperature and heating & cooling energy results of your Chenath simulations within Hero.

You can watch the Hero v3.1 Webinar section on the Results Viewer at the 34:28 timestamp below:

https://youtu.be/2GDotcnaY2c?t=2068

Hourly Results Settings

To enable the Results Viewer you must ensure your project has enabled the Calculate Hourly Results option on your Project. This is located on the Project Data-grid tab:

You must enable "Calc. Hourly Results" to ensure the hourly simulation results for each zone, dwelling and project are retained from the Chenath simulation.

Use the "Save Hourly Results" to save those to your Hero files so they're available for future reference.

Note for performance reasons, you may wish to turn this feature off if you are not using the Results Viewer for older computers or very large projects.

Results Viewer

The Results Viewer becomes populated once your project has run a simulation with the "Calculate Hourly Results" setting on (available either from the Project data-grid tab or the Viewer itself). Use the "Save Hourly Results" setting and then save your Hero file to ensure next time you load your project you'll still have the hourly results without requiring a re-simulation.

The image below shows the Results Viewer with highlighted areas explained in the section below:

1 Hourly Results Settings

Explained in the section above

2 Selected Results Profile

The Results Combobox allows you to select which Simulation Profile you want to see in the Results Viewer. If you have enabled a Thermal Comfort Model (such as a free-running profile) or have run a Whole of House calculation you'll be running multiple simulations and can see each of their results. The "Thermal Rating" profile is the default NatHERS thermal-fabric simulation results.

3 Graph Settings

The Show Temperature checkbox will enable or disable the Temperature Chart in the Viewer

The Show Energy checkbox will enable to disable the Energy Chart in the Viewer which shows the Heating & Cooling Thermal Loads for each Zone, Dwelling or Project.

The Show Unconditioned Zones checkbox will hide any Unconditioned Zones from the graphs (similar to unchecking a Zone from the Dwellings & Zones section), and will exclude any Unconditioned Zones from Dwelling or Project average temperatures or loads.

4 Zone Selection Shortcuts

You can use the Clear and Select buttons to quickly select all Dwellings or Zones to show, or unselect all Zones such that you can focus on a specific zone or dwelling.

5 Dwelling & Zone Selection

In this area you can select or unselect the checkbox of a Zone or Dwelling to show or hide in the Graph views. This can be useful when you are wanting to focus on a particular area.

You can also select the Row in the list to highlight the Zone or Dwelling (if using Dwelling Group By mode) in the graphs and make it more easier to see.

You can then hit Escape to unselect any highlighted Zones.

If you have Show Unconditioned Zones setting off, then those zones will be unselectable.

Note special zones (such as subfloors or roofspace zones) are not currently shown in the Viewer (coming soon).

6 Date Range & Zoom Button

The currently visible "Date From" and "Date To", which can be selected to limit the range of hourly results shown in the graph (or use the Fit Width buttons).

The Zoom button allows you to select the start and finish point the range and zoom in the charts.

Note you can alternatively mouse-drag select a section of the Chart to zoom into that section.

7 Fit Width

You can use the Viewer's Fit Width buttons (Day/Week/Month/Year) to quick set the width of the Viewer's graphs from 24/168/720/8760 hour ranges.

8 Skip buttons

The Skip Button has three steps of forward/back that will shift the current date-range in the graphs by a varied amount depending on the current width.

This can be a great way to skip through the results at closer visual scale to try to get greater understanding of the simulation results and what they can show us.

You can achieve the same skip effect by using the Left and Right Keyboard keys, or by Double Left-Clicking the left or right side of the graphs to move forward or back.

9 Go To Key Peak Date Shortcuts

In the Go To section of the Viewer, you can select a range of dates of interest that may be useful for your analysis, including the Hottest or Coldest day, a Peak Heating/Cooling day (for thermal fabric conditioned profiles only), a Windy Summer day (which can be useful for natural ventilation analysis) and Max Solar irradiation day.

10 Group By Options

With the Viewer's Group By options (Zone, Dwelling or Project) you can choose what level of analysis you'd like to see the Hourly Results in.

The default Group By Zone setting will show you the Zone's actual hourly results, whereas the Group By Dwelling option will show you the average temperature of all zones of the Dwellings, and the Group by Project option will likewise show you your project average temperature across all zones and dwellings (excluding any Common Area Dwelling zones).

Note if the Show Unconditioned Zones setting is off then these zones won't contribute to the dwelling or project average results.

The above image shows the Group by Zone or Group by Project results.

11 Export Hourly Results Options

The export menu allows you to export either the charts as an image, or entirely export the hourly results of the current selected profile to the clipboard (ready to paste) or to a CSV file for post-processing and analysis.

12 Temperature Chart

The Temperature chart can show the Outside/External temperature as well as the hourly temperature results for each selected Zone or Dwelling or the Project (depending on Group by setting).

The chart above shows the flat 20 degree heated rooms that are being turned on/off as per the NatHERS zoning profiles, the unconditioned zones having no flat sections, along with the lower temperature chart showing the outside air temperature.

13 Energy Chart

The Energy Chart shows the Thermal Heating & Cooling loads derived from the Chenath simulations in kW energy levels.

The below image shows the Temperature and Energy charts of a project on a winter day, showing most of the heating required in the kitchen, a very large morning spike when heating was turned on and a steady 5kW approximate heating load to the end of the night.

For a Thermal Comfort free-running profile this will be empty and the chart can be unselected using the Show Energy setting.

Note these are the uncorrected results (i.e. no area-correction factors etc applied).

14 Chart Legend

The Legend not only serves as a visual colour reference to the charts, but can also be hovered or clicked to highlight a specific Zone (or Dwelling in Dwelling Group by Mode) in the charts to allow better clarity and focus.

The image above shows a highlighted zone (mouse-hover or mouse-click to retain the highlight, escape to clear/cancel).

Thermal Comfort Results

The Results Viewer can be particularly useful in combination with the Thermal Comfort model, such as a free-running (no heating or cooling) profile. The results can help designers get a better feel for how well their projects will passively perform.

The below image shows a Free-Running (no heating/cooling) example where despite a 6.3 star rating, on a cold day (max of 11 deg), the rooms in this home never exceeded 18 degrees and was dropping down to internal temperatures of around 13 degree. As we can see from the Thermal Comfort results to the Right of the screen, the project has 37.9% Cold Rating (below 18 degrees) meaning for 37.9% of the year, the dwelling will be less than 18 degrees on average.

The second image below shows a hot day, with most of the zones having a reasonable temperature, however Bed 3 & Bed 2 showed significantly higher temperatures. This might be the focus of our design attention upon these zones specifically, as it does appear by the 2.4% Hot Rating in the Thermal Comfort section that generally the dwelling is performing OK in summer (noting that the NatHERS Weather files typically average out extreme weather events and heatwaves).