In recent years, several intensive studies have been carried out in order to reduce the energy consumption of buildings. One solution lies on whole building energy simulation that permits to enable the heat (and moisture) transfer through the building envelope and, consequently, is a way to understand how to improve the building performance. This article aims to analyze the modeling level needed to successfully evaluate the heat transfer through glazing parts of windows in such whole-building simulations as it is well-known that windows are the thermally weakest elements of the building envelope. In this way, predictions of glazing surface and zone air temperatures and energy demand obtained using both resistive and finite-volume based models are compared. Results show that for common window glazing structure and outdoor/indoor perturbations, differences between the two models are small. However, in the case of glazing presenting higher solar absorption and thermal inertia, the use of the finite-volume based model is required to accurately predict the glazing internal surface temperature and avoid errors up to 50% for energy consumption in the studied case. Those results put into relief a clear limitation of current whole energy simulation programs to correctly predict the energy consumption of buildings where high thermal inertia double- or triple-glazing windows are installed. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.