PHPP matches quite well for monthly heating and cooling energy demand when compared to lots of dynamic energy modelling software tools. And it should, as the equations/methods in PHPP have been developed (and simplified) by reference to many dynamic simulations.
The bar graph comparing the monthly heating and cooling energy demand has the PHPP as the rightmost bar. Note that these simulations are compared to a measured building in other papers and match well. The issue with most of the software is having enough experience to model the building correctly in the software.
Images and the following quote are from the paper cited below. “The model of the reference office building, reported in IEA SHC Task 56, is implemented by different experts in building simulations, with different tools (i.e. dynamics simulation tools such as EnergyPlus, TRNSYS, CarnotUIBK, ALMAbuild, DALEC, Modelica and quasi steady state calculation tool such as PHPP). The aim is to set up reference models for (virtually) testing different solar passive and solar active façade systems. Hence, identifying deviations between the resulting energy balance for heating and cooling of the used tools due to different levels of detail of their models is of great importance, while in the same time, trying to get rid of the user influence was experienced as a real challenge.”
By Mara Magni, Fabian Ochs, Paolo Bonato, Matteo D’Antoni, David Geisler-Moroder, Samuel de Vries, Roel Loonen, Alessandro Maccarini, Alireza Afshari, Toni Calabrese