Cross-Discipline tabase prices with your model and provides a building estimate. You can refine your analysis by changing material and labour prices of each item and category. You can also export results to Microsoft Excel and bill of material (BOM) files.
THE EXAMPLE PROJECT The designer is spending a day exploring early design directions. The project is a small restaurant, cafe and wine bar located in downtown Toronto, Ontario. The client wants a modern, minimalistic style to which they have provided photos of desired features. Natural lighting is highly desired. Exterior summer patios need to be strategically placed for an enjoyable customer experience. The client is interested in exploring LEED certification up to Silver. There is an ugly and busy parking lot to the south of the site that the client wants to keep out of customer view. Don’t forget the tight budget and accelerated schedule which always comes standard. EXAMINE THE SITE It has been said that an energy efficient building in Phoenix is not an energy efficient building in Montreal. The local climate and situation of the site should drive your design. So, we will start our design by picking the location on the Google Map built into Revit Architecture 2011. Massing Tools, Sketchup or even AutoCAD 3D can be used for contextual buildings. It may be a good idea to create this in a separate file and link it into your designs for context as needed. Revit Architecture 2011 has a nice tool to show the Sun (Earth) position. Use this to examine how adjacent building’s shadows affect the building in question. Soil cut/fill volumes may assist in quantifying the material that needs to be removed or added to the site.
sustainable opportunities. In the case of this site there is an opportunity to get 67% of annual electricity form solar panels and 58% of your annual water load from rain. You can incorporate these possibilities right into your design even before schematic. It’s not fun designing a rain water collection system after the building design is done.
Figure 2 – Wind Rose report from IES <VE>
MAKE THE MODEL There are many good whitepapers and tutorials on how to properly model a building for energy analysis. In fact the winter Issue of AUGI | AEC EDGE gave us some best practices in the article entitled “How to Help Simplify Sustainable Design Analysis with BIM” written by Philip Membreno. Some suggestions are to make a simple model, turn on Area and Volume computations and make sure your rooms extend from floor to floor or roof face. You will need at least one model for each major design iteration. Once you model your baseline design do a simple ‘save as’ for more versions. Stay away from the Design Options and Phasing tools if possible because this tends to create ‘issues’ in energy analysis as well as cost analysis. The Import Model button on the IES plug-in menu allows you to pick a building type, location, heating and cooling system and construction materials which represent a good baseline for the building. Use the Energy/Carbon Simulation to get a projected annual energy usage. This will be calculated in Mega Watt hours. This is broken down further by room, system (lights, boilers) and month.
Figure 1 – The new Solar Path feature
IES is ideal for displaying site specific climate and weather data. You may want to use IES Virtual Environment to display a Wind Rose which will graphically show wind data during specific time periods. The IES VE Toolkit can be used to instantly discover spring_2010
The LEED Daylighting credit is just a single button click on the LEED menu in the IES VE Toolkit. Calculating the LEED Daylighting credit for a building of this size may take as much as 45min.
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