How to account for the height and building in front of my window?

[wsw70]

I live in an apartment, on the 3rd floor and I have in front of my window another building at a certain distance. Both buildings are at he same height. Below is my attempt to show this:

My understanding from the docs is that the viewport (= the horizontal plane view spectrum) is handled. What about the vertical plane? In other words the fact that the sun may be obstructed vertically by the building that i sin front of me?

Is this something I can configure? A pointer to the documentation would be great -- there are so many variables to configure that I am confused (and this is great because the more configuration the more better, starting is a bit complicating ad that's all)

[jrhubott]

There's a setting for this, though it's not obvious from the FOV field alone. FOV (left/right) only covers the horizontal plane: it tells the integration whether the sun is in front of your window at all, but it has no idea what's blocking the sun vertically.

What you want is Minimal Elevation, on the Sun Tracking step: "Sun must be above this angle before tracking activates." Below that elevation the cover just stays at its default position, since ACP treats the sun as not a factor yet. That matches your situation: the opposite building blocks direct sun until it clears the roofline, so I'd set Minimal Elevation to that roofline angle. Tracking won't kick in until the sun's actually cleared the building and reached your window.

To get the number, take arctan of the roofline height above your window line divided by the horizontal distance to the building. Rough measurements are fine. You can nudge the value once you've watched the cover behave for a few days.

There's also Blind Spot, which does something similar but scoped to a specific azimuth range, with its own elevation threshold (mode below is the low-obstruction case, same idea as Minimal Elevation). I'd reach for that if the obstruction only covered part of your horizontal arc, say a building off to one side. Since both buildings in your case are the same height and it's directly in front of you, Minimal Elevation is the simpler fit: no need to carve out a wedge when the whole FOV is obstructed the same way.

For details, see the Sun Tracking wiki page.