Warehouse with Office

Sometimes it is necessary to create a smaller zone such as an office within a larger zone (e.g. a large warehouse space). This tutorial shows 2 different ways to set up a simple 2-zone model such as that illustrated in the screenshots below where a small office is located in bottom corner of a larger warehouse space.

 

    

 

 

In general this type of building can most easily be drawn using the Add Surface tool to remove the single height block from the double height space of the warehouse. This method avoids the need to draw a tall space using multiple blocks and merging the blocks using holes drawn between them (see Method 2 below). This section shows how to do this using two blocks one representing the complete building, the other representing the single height parts of the building.

 

  1. The main warehouse block may be created by extruding from a horizontal or vertical perimeter, depending on whether the plan or the gable surface is more complex. For a rectangular plan it is generally easiest to draw a vertical perimeter and extrude horizontally as it allows any pitched or curve roofs to be produced without multiple operations.
  2. The easiest way to draw a vertical perimeter is to draw the horizontal base line drawn first and then snapping the second vertical perimeter line to the vertical axis. Protractor and centre snap tools help when drawing a simple pitched roof in this way.







  3. The added surface (really a removed section) will correspond with the geometry of the single height spaces and is best drawn with its perimeter on the base of the complete block if the perimeter is polygonal. Click on the Add Surface tool and draw the perimeter.



    When complete, drag upwards to define the height, entering the height manually or using increment snap.




  4. The surface that has been removed needs to be replaced by a separate block. Make sure that the base is visible and start the Add Block command.




  5. The main geometry is now complete.



  6. If the floor above the office space is not accessible space then navigate to that floor element and on the construction tab select Exclude this surface from total zone area see screenshot below. If the floor is accessible then you should draw virtual partitions around it's perimeter.


 

 

The steps involved are:

 

1. Draw the ground floor block including both office and warehouse. The block should be the height of the office space as the top of the block will form the ceiling of the office.

 

 

2. Draw the 1st floor block representing the high-level warehouse space.

 

3. Draw a hole in the floor of the 1st floor block to connect the upper and lower warehouse zones together. The upper warehouse zone should look something like the screenshot below. The green line shows the perimeter of the hole.

 

 

4. Select the Merge zones connected by holes model option to merge the upper and lower parts of the warehouse into a single zone.

 

5. The 'floor' on top of the office zone is not usable floor area so go to this floor surface and select the Exclude this surface from total zone floor area option. This indicates that the surface is not part of the building useable floor area. This step ensures that this floor area is not counted in the floor area provided to certification tools such as SBEM. This step is not currently required for EnergyPlus simulations.

Note: if the excluded floor surface contains some external adjacencies as well as internal ones these external areas will not be subtracted from the zone floor area.

 

So the building now consists of 2 zones - an Office and a Warehouse zone. This model is available as one of the DesignBuilder example templates.

The process involved with merging zones connected by holes is illustrated in the Drawing holes and merging zones tutorial