Uncategorized — Comments Off on ECCOLAB V2.1 release
08
Nov 22

ECCOLAB V2.1 release

COP27 presents an opportunity for all stakeholders to come together to find concrete solutions to the global climate emergency, including on mitigation, adaptation, and resilience.

We are making our own contribution.

Firstly why ECCOLAB?

We help to transform understanding of how the built environment impacts the world around us and support the construction industries transition to an efficient low carbon future which is urgent.

An accessible and straightforward solution that gives the whole picture of Energy, Carbon Cost and Materials life cycle analysis brought together in one integrated design guidance tool.

V2.1 is now being released following customer feedback which allows the improved sharing of templates between users with organisational libraries within companies. They can incorporate their own data sets and improve their internal collaboration.

https://eccolab.co/

General / gEnergy / gModeller — Comments Off on CLIMATE CHANGE EMERGENCY
10
Aug 21

CLIMATE CHANGE EMERGENCY

Climate change is having a significant impact on businesses, society, and individuals. It is increasingly understood that a shift towards a low-carbon economy is needed. The building and construction sector plays a central role in this shift. The sector’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions account for approximately 40% of global GHG emissions. The major contributors to these emissions are the materials used as well as the heating, cooling, and lighting of buildings and infrastructure.

For example, around 80% of UK buildings that will be occupied in 2050 have already been built. Long-term adaptation strategies are therefore necessary to ensure that buildings and the built environment are resilient to future climate impacts.

For high performance buildings an early exercise with Building Performance Simulation by Energy Modelling enables the evaluation of numerous solutions to explore these parameters:

  • Low embodied energy with environmental appropriate materials
  • Lower costs with selection of new materials and technologies
  • Hybrid solutions
  • On-site generation and energy storage systems
  • Level of disruption to occupants

These are just some of the factors and this process starts with simple modelling.

Building professionals including Architects will generally require a visual 3D model at an early stage.

 The Greenspace Live gModeller based on Trimble Sketchup enables an early exercise in Energy Modelling and energy analysis engine gEnergy enables full dynamic simulation to optimise solutions and address the emergency.

Uncategorized — Comments Off on ECCOlab
08
Oct 20

ECCOlab

ECCOlab – a new solution at www.eccolab.co

Currently most design teams focus only on operational energy and cost of a building, and often only the operational utility costs at that. In financial analysis no one would approach a business decision this way; the cost of the loan and the revenue must be considered together. Our tool brings this approach to the construction sector addressing embodied as well as operation carbon and cost.

In addition, interrelated issue such as waste, responsible sourcing and health and wellbeing of materials are not addressed in a unified manner. They are usually carried out in a range of independent analysis’ and are often too time consuming to have any impact on any direct design decision. They are often more of a rubber-stamping exercise, seeing if BREEAM points can be achieved after the materials have already been specified.

The Solution is ECCOlab

It allows rapid analysis of the building for the life of the project by rapidly simulating lifecycle cost and carbon as well last the life cycle waste, responsible sourcing and health and wellbeing impacts. It achieves this by bringing the model into a single web environment where cloud simulations of the project take place. The model is attributed with materials from the vast material database (all of which can be extend / manipulated) allowing detailed information / data to be rapidly added to the BIM model even at concept stage. This allows intelligent decisions to be made at the most beneficial point, at the concept design stage of the project.

The tool is also a collaboration tool and operates like Google Docs in that all members of the team can work live on the same model. This eliminates the current silo analysis approach where consultants go off for two weeks at a time and carry out often divergent analysis, often on an out of date model.

Being cloud based the simulation process is vastly quicker than the previous generation of simulation software (minutes for a simulation instead of hours). As such, the tool allows multiple iterations of a project to simulate different strategies and allow rapid project optimisation to take place.

Uncategorized — Comments Off on Software Developer Position
01
Sep 20

Software Developer Position

We are looking for a software developer to join our team based in Scotland and London. The position is available for an initial 10 month contract. We’re accepting applications until the 23rd September 2020. Please see the job description below:

Rapiere Software Developer (PDF)

Uncategorized — Comments Off on gModeller 2.2.11
04
Jun 20

gModeller 2.2.11

gModeller 2.2.11 has been released.

Now, construction names instead of their ids are displayed in the building details and construction panels. Also, the materials within a construction are now stored in separate layers within the gbXML export instead of all in the same layer.

The renaming of surfaces and spaces has been changed so they use consistent indexes for surfaces in multiple spaces. Also, spaces created with unique custom names no longer have numbers added to them.

Download at: gModeller-2.2.11.rbz

Uncategorized — Comments Off on gModeller 2.2.9
03
Mar 20

gModeller 2.2.9

gModeller 2.2.9 has now been released. In this version, id surface labels are now put into their own group. The custom rename dialog has checkboxes to enable or disable the renaming of spaces, surfaces, or openings.

Download at:

gModeller-2.2.9.rbz

gModeller — Comments Off on gModeller 2.2.8
29
Nov 19

gModeller 2.2.8

gModeller 2.2.8 has been released. This now allows painting of materials within groups in SketchUp, and fixes an issue where materials painted with the color picker weren’t always detected in the Mac OS version. Also, a button to remove all spaces was added to the building details tab.

Download at:

gModeller-2.2.8.rbz

Uncategorized — Comments Off on gModeller 2.2.7
29
Oct 19

gModeller 2.2.7

gModeller 2.2.7 has been released. This now allows reassigning of adjacent spaces in the surface and opening popups. The IDF export has been updated to target EnergyPlus 9.1.

Also, the creation of duplicate spaces has been prevented, and the sort order in tables with numerical values has been fixed.

Download at:

gModeller-2.2.7

Uncategorized — Comments Off on EccoLab
21
Oct 19

EccoLab

Who will use ECCOlab?

Architects, Engineers, Cost Consultants, Environmental & Sustainability Consultants, Contractors, Developers, Estate Managers and other Construction Industry Professionals.

A de-facto standard for their projects or for use by in-house teams during the project appraisal stage. Open data formats will encourage suppliers and manufacturers to enrich the databases.

Why will they use ECCOlab?

Graphically rich (input and results), clear workflow (inputs to results), audit trail, facilitates optioneering and optimisation, performance-based analysis, strong support for collaboration and interoperability, innovative e-business models.

What will they use ECCOlab for?

To estimate and optioneer on capital and lifecycle cost, carbon and energy performance

When will they use ECCOlab

RIBA stages 0 – 5 with good interoperability with downstream tools.

Uncategorized — Comments Off on Energy Modelling Benefits
17
Jul 19

Energy Modelling Benefits

To achieve significant and deep interventions required to meet the challenging targets necessitates a decision-making process that evaluates fabric and technology solutions at an early stage in the design process. The interaction between all the different elements can only be evaluated by dynamic simulation which utilises the laws of physics to simulate how an asset should perform.

Projects using energy modelling generally exceed the energy reduction targets and tend to encourage good sustainable design where passive design strategies make bigger impact to curb energy use are evaluated and incorporated to achieve demanding targets. Energy modelling from easily obtained data also helps design teams consider all the elements and their likely impact on carbon use where targets can be set and regularly checked against progress.

To encourage widespread use of dynamic simulation an on-line web and cloud-based approach is offered by GSL which is affordable and much more accessible to the construction industry. With the need for significant investment to achieve energy efficiency targets new initiatives such as Energy Performance Contracting will require the detailed evaluation of the most cost-effective solutions so that these contacts are well prepared, and risks minimised.

All investment decisions require good planning and risk informed decision making which in turn requires evaluation of fabric/technology solutions long before and capital expenditure takes place. Optimising the impact of solutions can be evaluated to maximise the rate of return on investment.

A web-based approach allows for on-line collaboration where all professionals involved in the projects can communicate and share data virtually which has a resulting productivity gain.

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