by Stuart Morgan & David Wren
In Building’s Edit-General dialog on the Further Details tab, Choose - Opens up the MEPworx EPW Weather Chooser.
Here you can select either, National Renewal Energy Laboratory EPW data files (NREL/EPW) live from the web. The NREL Website contains a *.JSON file with a catalogue of globally available weather files. The Chooser program connects to this online JSON file and shows the available locations on the map.
Or, you can pick from the selection of One Building regional geo-database KML files, which are stored locally in the DB\Weather folder.
The default region is, Region6_Europe_EPW_Processing_locations.
When a location is selected by double-clicking, that point on the map becomes Red to confirm the selection.
The EPW data is then downloaded and automatically extracted to its own named sub-folder in DB\Weather\EPW.
If you want to download and add your own EPW/DDY data files, simply drop the ZIP data file into the DB\Weather\EPW folder. Then extract it to its own named sub-folder.
Those weather data files can then be selected via the Browse button in the Building’s Edit-General dialog on the Further Details tab, where you can select them for use in your project.
If EPW data for multiple locations has been previously downloaded using either NREL/EPW or One Building, those points will be highlighted in Red on the respective maps.
Those points for any previously downloaded locations will remain highlighted in Red and available for selection in the Building program, until such time as the downloaded ZIP file is deleted from DB\Weather\EPW on your PC.
To summarise, the colours of the pins on the maps indicate:
- Mustard coloured Pins are available NREL/EPW sourced weather location files.
- Blue coloured Pins are available OneBuilding.Org weather location files.
- Red coloured Pins on either of the above weather data systems, are locations that have already been downloaded.
Please note: This application cannot be used without an Internet connection because it uses Web-Based Map Control and the catalogue, plus the files, are all on the Web.
Hence without an Internet connection, this program will not start-up or run.