5.3 Schedules

The Typical Schedules pull-down menu can be used to populate the Weekly and Annual Schedule tables, described below, with ‘typical’ schedules for a couple common functions: School (morning weighted, weekdays), Office (weekdays), Airport (heavy mornings/afternoons, weekends). There is also an option to use ‘all hours’. If the building functionality is unknown or is likely to change over it’s lifetime, than it is recommended to do daylighting analysis using ‘all hours’. If the building will have a very specific use and function over it’s lifetime (like most schools) than a more customized schedule that best reflects the buildings use is recommended.

Weekly Schedule

The weekly schedule table defines 7 daily building occupancy schedules, one for each day of the week. The schedule can impact both the annual metric calculations and the annual energy saving calculations.

For the annual metric calculations the unoccupied times, either weekly hours that are set to 0.0 or annual days that are set to “U“noccupied, are not included with the exception of the sDA and ASE metrics defined in the IESNA LM-83 document. Skipping weekends usually does not have a big impact, but if you want to ensure everyday is included the same way in the annual metric make the daily schedule identical for all 7 days and then use the annual schedule to mark which days throughout the year should be included.

For the energy calculations, the fraction of occupancy indicated in the weekly schedule is also taken into account. A value of one means the space is fully occupied and the lights would be fully on if not controlled with a photosensor system. A value of 0.5 indicates that 50% of similar spaces are occupied (when using a space multiplier in the annual calculations) or a single space is occupied during that hour 50% of the time. A value of 0 means the space is not occupied. This is used as a multiplier when peforming the annual energy calculations to account for occupancy impacts in the potential daylight energy saving predictions.

Annual Schedule

The annual schedule table defines an annual daily occupancy schedule for the space and is used the same in the annual metric and energy calculations: if a day is marked “U“noccupied it is not included. The table is a grid of cells, which represent each day of the year with the months listed along the top and the day along the side. “O” for occupied and “U” for unoccupied are used in each cell to indicate which days are and which are not occupied. Note that an unoccupied “U” input in the annual schedule means the entire day is absolutely unoccupied and the weekly schedule is unused. An occupied “O” input in the annual schedule means that the space abides by the weekly schedule for that day. January 1st is chosen arbitrarily to be a Monday (calendar year 2007 for coordinating with a DOE-2 schedule). The diagonal yellow and blue buttons at the top of this table allows the user to fill an entire month or the entire year as either occupied or unoccupied. Clicking the blue portion of the button will fill in unoccupied “U” values and clicking the yellow portion of the button will fill in occupied “O” values.