There are some general points to note when using the Solar Analysis feature. These are listed below:
- Results are only produced for the external surfaces of Spaces and (as of VE 2017) Free-standing PV Panels.
- Internal surfaces and other geometry types such as Adjacent Buildings, Topographical Shades, Local Shades and so on do not produce results but will still affect the shading results produced.
- External surfaces of spaces include: walls, roofs, windows and doors but not floors.
- Please note results for doors are only calculated as part of Energy analysis.
- As with normal SunCast calculations, a single design day is used for each month.
- This result is then used for every day of the month.
- The design day for Solar Analysis is set to the 15th of each month.
- Please note Apache still produces results for each and every day as normal.
- For each hour the sun is considered either up or down for that hour.
- The exact sun up/down time isn’t taken into account.
- The SunCast surface results returned are for Percentage Area
- Percentage Area = Area In Sun ÷ Total Surface Area.
- The Apache surface results returned are for Ext surface incident solar flux.
- The results displayed are an accumulation of the hourly results for the display period specified.
- As the results output from SunCast/Apache are on the hour, the accumulation of results is inclusive of the start and end time, i.e. the number of results = (end − start) + 1. For example: A single day analysis between 0800 and 1800 is the accumulation of 11 results.