I am performing a basic flat plate solar thermal analysis and I was trying to use the Aux Gas Heater macro and my KWh seem way too high. Orders high. My device only produces about 200 kWh/month (2000 kWh/year) and the macro is reporting. Does the length of the analysis factor into the Aux Gas Heater code? I noticed the code 'time_steps' is based on the Q_saved array. Is Q_saved based on the analysis period (lifetime)?
There is a mistake in the "Auxiliary Gas Heater" macro in SAM 2011.11.24 that causes the results to be off by a factor of 1000. That is because SAM 2014.1.14 and earlier reported hourly values in kW, and the new version reports them in W, and we forgot to change the units when we converted the macro from the old version to the new.
To fix the problem, click
Macros, and then click
Auxiliary Gas Heater to display the macro. Click
View code (at the upper left corner of the window), and change lines 60, 61, and 62 so that each term is divided by 1000 (see below). Then click
Save and
Close. The next time you run the macro, it should generate values in the correct kWh units. Note that you can not run the macro from the script editor -- you have to close the editor and run the macro by clicking
Run macro from the Macro page.
We will fix this in the January 2015 update.
Best regards,
Paul.