greenspaceLive will be doing server maintenance and upgrades over the 29th of August. During this time, access to greenspaceLive software services may be affected. We apologise for any inconvenience.
16
Aug 12
HHP Awarded Share of £4 Million DECC Green Heating Systems Fund
Hebridean Housing Parnership (HHP) was delighted with the announcement in Nivember 2011 by the Department of Energy And Climate Change (DECC) that HHP is one of twenty four social housing providers across the UK to have been awarded a share of the £4 million fund to install green heating systems in the houses of their tenants. There were 125 bids submitted. HHP received the highest level of the award – £175k. The Energy and Climate Change Minister Greg Barker said:
“This scheme directly targets many of the people who could struggle to pay their heating bills in the winter and I am pleased so many in the social housing orgainsations acress the country will be able to get a share of the cash. It will encourage an increase in the number of new heating technologies in social housing and help people deal with expensive fuel costs.”
Commenting on the award, the Chairman of HHP, George Lonie, said that the grant was a welcome boost to HHP’s goals of reducing the level of fuel poverty being experienced by tenants.
The bids were evaluated by a panel of experts including the Scottish and Welsh Governments, Energy Savings Trust and DECC representatives.
greenspaceLive have been engaged to carry out a study on a number of houses and the results of the study will inform future survey and investment works.
09
Aug 12
HHP recognised as leaders in renewables
Extract from HHP – Homeward (July 2012)
In 2011 Hebridean Housing Partnership (HHP) were successful in their bid for Renewable Heat Premium Payment (RHPP) funding from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). HHP were one of only a dozen Housing Associations in the UK to receive the full funding amount of £175,000 which went towards the installation, and monitoring of Air Source Heat Pumps. HHP impressed the judging panel, which included experts from the Scottish and Welsh Government, Energy Saving Trust and DECC.
A representative of DECC said the HHP bid was exemplary. On the 28th May HHP were asked to help the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) launch a new £10 million scheme aimed at installing renewable heating across Great Britain.
The second phase of the Renewable Heat Premium Payment (RHPP2) is a competition available to all UK social landlords including HHP. HHP Investment Manager, Peter O’Donnell and Donald Macritchie, Director of Greenspace gave a presentation to industry leaders at the event in St Martins in the Field in London alongside the Energy and Climate Change Minister Greg Barker. The presentation was well received by those attending including DECC and the Energy Savings Trust. Greenspace are based at Lews Castle College UHI and provide consulting support to HHP Chair George Lonie said: “I am delighted that HHP have been recognised on the national stage for the work we are doing in trying to combat the significant challenge of fuel poverty in the Western Isles. We are also delighted to be able to assist DECC in the launch of the next round of funding for the RHPP social landlord competition.”
HHP will now be looking to prepare a bid for RHPP2 to enable more homes within our stock to have access to renewable heating systems.
19
Apr 12
Introducing gModeller V1.6 – With Energy+ Support
Today, we released version 1.6 of gModeller!
gModeller V1.6 contains a number of bug fixes, and user interface tweaks, and we have also included Energy+ support!
Energy+ Support
With the Energy+ extension to SketchUp you can now model your building in Google SketchUp, add building properties using gModeller and then perform an energy analysis of the model using Energy+, directly from within SketchUp. You can also export an Energy+ IDF file in order to carry out more advanced Energy+ analyses on your model, and this can be used in a number of Energy+ focused downstream tools. This is in addition to being able to export your SketchUp model as gbXML which can be used in a large variety of downstream analysis tools!
Energy+ Options in gModeller
The Energy+ extension to gModeller is still at a Beta level of development, and is not quite complete yet. This means that the functionality is not fully complete, and at the moment provides support for model geometry and constructions, we are still working on implementing system handling and other functionality required to carry out a full Energy+ analysis. Because the Energy+ extension is still in beta, it may contain some bugs and other small glitches when analysing models. However, we are really excited about this functionality in gModeller and thought we would share it with you. We’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions on this, and we will be updating gModeller with more fully featured Energy+ features soon.
Other Updates
gModeller V1.6 also contains a number of other usability and bug fixes as listed below:
- Improved Mac OS X Support – gModeller should work much better on Mac OS X. Installing on Mac OS X is now much easier and does not require your Flash Player Security settings to be modified.
- Improved gbXML import – importing gbXML in gModeller is now faster, and more reliable on both Windows and Mac OS X.
- Improved surface attribution materials – we’ve updated the building surface attribution materials in gModeller and fixed some issues with these in Mac OS X.
- Slight user interface changes.
- Fixed some issues with logging in and out of gModeller.
- Added more constructions and materials to the Construction library section – this is important for Energy+ support!
- More…
To begin using the latest versions of gModeller, you’ll need to download and install gModeller for Windows or gModeller for Mac OS X from our website. You will then be able to log into gModeller using your GreenspaceLive account and begin modelling. If you don’t have a GreenspaceLive account, please visit our website to register for a free trial!
We hope you enjoy this latest version of gModeller and would love to hear your feedback!
– Malcolm Murray, Product Manager
16
Apr 12
Survey Winner Announced!
Congratulations to Alexandre Braz who has won the bottle of Highland Park whisky for completing our user survey!
Keep an eye out for more competitions and promotions from greenspaceLive!
06
Apr 12
Project RAPIER
During Ecobuild we unveiled a project that we’ve been working on for the last 18 months called RAPIER.
Presenting RAPIER at Ecobuild
RAPIER is a Web Application that allows for early stage analysis of Cost, Embodied Carbon, and Energy usage of building ideas. Users can set up building options with various designs and parameters, run them through the RAPIER engine and then compare results across all options.
RAPIER has been been put together by a consortium of four partners: GreenspaceLive, Architype, BDSP, and Sweett Group – each partner bringing their own expertise to be encapsulated into the engines that run behind the scenes, and into the design of the front-end interface. RAPIER is a Web application that has been built by its users for its users!
RAPIER has a pretty awesome user interface – its completely built using HTML and Javascript, which means that RAPIER works in almost any browsers – from your mobile phone, to iPad, to Laptop or Desktop computer. All the heavy processing takes place on the cloud, so the application is extremely portable, all you need is a wifi or mobile internet connection!
RAPIER uses a card based interface which allows you to easily compare different building options, or focus in on one and drill down into the details. We’ve taken a smart default approach to data population – you can setup a building in seconds using our default templates, or you can drill down into a more complex level of detail and setup your options just the way you want them to be. You can also duplicate and change options, to try out and compare different parameters – e.g., what difference would using a steel structure make as opposed to a concrete structure? Or, what is the cost and carbon difference if I ship my materials from Scotland instead of China?
The engines running behind the scenes in RAPIER are based on years of industry expertise and best practice. The RAPIER cost model provides estimated capital and operational costs based on real building portfolios. The RAPIER embodied carbon engine provides detailed carbon estimates including comprehensive travel carbon – from component source to building location. The RAPIER thermal model is built on existing research work carried out by BDSP, and carries out a dynamic thermal and energy simulaiton of your model.
On top of this, RAPIER uses gbXML as a way of making its building options portable – you can export your options as gbXML and import them into Google SketchUp using GreenspaceLive’s gModeller and gEnergy EPC, DesignBuilder, IES, Ecotect, TAS, and a bunch of others as well – this will allow you to carry out further downstream analysis of your options.
RAPIER isn’t quite finished yet, and has just been unveiled. We are hoping to run an alpha testing programme quite soon, and are inviting people to register interest in taking part by visiting projectrapier.com and signing up. We will provide test users with accounts when we are ready to being testing. Also, please use this form to contact us for more information regarding RAPIER.
The slides we presented at Ecobuild are available for viewing below on slide share. You can also click the link to download the presentation.
Keep an eye on this blog, and on the Project RAPIER website for more further developments!
27
Mar 12
Ecobuild 2012 Round-up!
Thanks to all who came along to visit us at Ecobuild this year, we hope you had a good a time as we did!
We’re still running our 15% off Ecobuild promotion, why not take advantage while you still can?
In-case you weren’t able to attend or lost all your materials from us (We know, papers everywhere) we’ve made everything available on-line!
You can still download our digital brochure here.
Download our digital case study here.
Learn more and register for Project Rapier here: www.projectrapier.com
If you have any further enquiries, email us at:
info@greenspacelive.com
View some images of our visit below!
28
Feb 12
gModeller at Ecobuild, London ExCel, March 20 – 22
This year we will also be attending Ecobuild, where we’ll be exhibiting all the gModeller products as well as showing off Rapier, a prototype software that rapidly produces cost, energy and carbon lifecycle analysis of new build projects. You can find us at Stand 2367. You can register for free http://www.ecobuild.co.uk/register.html. We look forward to seeing you there.
28
Feb 12
Help us improve greenspaceLive
We are constantly seeking ways to improve our gModeller service and feel that the best way to do so is by receiving feedback from our users.As part of our program for 2012 we are asking everyone who has downloaded and used gModeller software, to take part in our user survey.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/gModellerUserSurvey
It is completely anonymous, but if you would like to see the results then please leave us your email address when you do the survey.
18
Jan 12
Win an iPad Contest Winner Announced!
You may remember in 2011, greenspaceLive held a “Register and win an iPad competition”
Well, we selected a winner at random and that winner was Marc-André, a Building Services Engineer from Switzerland!
Here’s an image of him with his prize!
"Thanks again for this great gift and your good job at greenspacelive!"
Congratulations Marc!