Help

Unmet Hours is a question-and-answer site for building energy modelers and others interested in building performance simulation and analysis. It is built and run by you, the building energy modeling community.

Unmet Hours is different from the traditional mailing lists and forums. Keep reading to see how Unmet Hours works!

Overview: Find answers without digging

Unmet Hours aims to provide a clean way of presenting questions and answers. You shouldn’t have to dig through all of the responses in a thread to find the best answer to a question. Unmet Hours will hide all of the discussion and debate and highlight the important information:

The questions…

…and the answers.

Voting: Good questions deserve good answers

Well written, well researched posts deserve to have good visibility in the community. In Unmet Hours, good answers are voted up and they rise to the top. This way the best answers show up first and are always the easiest to find.

Click on the arrows to vote a post up or down:

Click on the checkmark to “accept” an answer as the best fit for a question you asked:

Remember to reward positive contributions by voting!

Guidelines: Help others help you

When asking a question keep in mind the scope of this site, please ask questions about:

• Building performance software
• Building envelope/lighting/HVAC components
• Building performance analysis techniques
• Building physics algorithms
• Building energy modeling community

Questions should be researched before posting:

• Search Unmet Hours to see if your question has already been asked.
• Reference any similar Unmet Hours questions and explain how they are different from yours.
• Read any relevant software documentation.
• Include any details about what you have tried already.

Questions that do not fit within these guidelines will be closed by the site moderators.

Tags: Make your questions easy to find

Tags offer a way to classify questions into meaningful categories. This makes it easier for people to find questions relevant to their interest and expertise.

You can choose which tags you would like to receive email updates about by adding tags to the “Interesting tags” or “Ignored tags” lists on the right-side navigation bar of the Questions page.

Subscriptions: Give your inbox a rest

In the traditional mailing list, you are accustomed to receiving every post (either as it happens or in a daily digest) regardless of the relevance of the content to your interest.

Unmet Hours offers you the capability to follow only questions that are of interest to you. These settings are found in your user profile under subscriptions (defaults shown):

The default is to receive instant emails when someone responds to a question you asked or explicitly follow, or when someone mentions your user name in a post. You’ll receive daily emails about activity on questions you have answered and weekly emails for all posts in Unmet Hours filtered by your tag preferences.

This allows you to set the frequency of the emails you receive based on your relationship with the question. You can also use “Interesting” and “Ignored” tags to filter the messages you receive.

Karma Points: Good things come to those who contribute

In a world where no good deed goes unpunished, we believe that good contributions to Unmet Hours should be rewarded. Karma points are rewarded to people asking good questions and providing good answers.

You get Karma points when others vote up your questions and answers. Your total Karma points are listed by your profile summary:

Karma points unlock different user privileges. This mechanism ensures that people are contributing and understand how Unmet Hours works before they make major changes to the site. Additionally, this mechanism serves to secure the site from cyber threats.

Editing: Maintain relevance and correctness

As time moves on and new information becomes available, inevitably some answers will become dated and lose relevance or even provide misinformation.

In Unmet Hours, all of the content in the Question and Answer posts is editable by the community (similar to the content in Wikipedia). If someone discovers a problem with the information in a post, or even something as small as a typo they can edit the post and fix the problems:

If the content of an answer or question isn’t clear, you can add a comment to ask for more information:

You can also @mention another user’s name to get their attention (e.g., “Hi, @Peter Ellis, do you want to weigh in here?”).

Badges: That’s what the flair’s about. It’s about fun.

To make things just a little more interesting there are also special achievements called badges that you can unlock through participation in Unmet Hours.

Badges don’t serve any purpose other than adding an element of fun to Unmet Hours and decorating your profile summary: