Overview

The default height settings for Plenums can be set when tracing rooms, or can be found in your Data Managers > Defaults menu.

Method

In nearly all cases Floor height and Room height should be equal (ie set to the height of the room), resulting in a plenum height of 0m. 

• Any ceiling plenum or air gap will already be taken into account in your calculations as part of the Internal floor / Internal ceiling construction (i.e. in Data Mangers>Materials):
  
  

• Rooms above/below will automatically be recognised as adjacent, as long as they are within the Adjacent Tolerance, as set in the Wiki below:
  Adjacent Tolerance setting - OpenBuildings | AECOsim | Speedikon Wiki - OpenBuildings | AECOsim | Speedikon - Bentley Communities
  
  
  
• Creating Plenum rooms will invalidate PartL Calculations as these spaces will be interpreted in SBEM as additional rooms in their own right. Similar applies to load calculations.

Plenums should only be modelled as rooms if there is a specific need to do so - i.e. if they are conditioned/occupied rooms maintained at a particular temperature. If not, they should not be created.