Straw Bale and any other advice

[mwperry]

Hi,

I am a student at Kingston University in South West London, UK. I am currently writing my dissertation and using your software (I purchased a £50 license).

My dissertation is based on comparing four different construction types in terms of sustainability, insulation values (based on required heating and cooling loads), economy etc. I have built a basic model of a standard, 3 bedroom home using Autodesk Revit Architecture, with the aim of importing it into VE in order to analyse the model. My four construction types are a mixture of traditional and modern techniques, namely: Brick/Block cavity, precast concrete panels, timber frame with a compressed board and render finish, and timber frame with straw bale infill.

I have been through the basic tuition that I downloaded from the VE website, but have a few questions.

Is there a template that could be used for the construction types stated above? Particularly straw bale, or would do I just make a custom construction type using U-values found in my research so far?

Do you think it would be better for me to model the building in VE and then analyse it, or is my approach of using Revit first the way you would recommend?

In the Apache section of the tutorial it shows how to analyse the building before and after solar shading in order to compare. This works fine when using the default 'Boston' location. When I change it to Brighton, UK however my nearest weather data is Heathrow. When I try to analyse this it come up with an error saying that the coordinate don't match. Any advice?

Is there any advice/tips you could offer me on using this software to achieve my goals?

I would be very grateful for any help with this project as I have had no training in using either VE or Revit other than a couple of tutorials and looking around online. I am experienced in AutoCAD, but only 2D.

Thanks in advance for any responses.
Martin.

[PCully]

Hi,

I've added some answers to specific queries below. The project doesn't sound too involved so I'm sure with a little practice you should be able to get some meaningful results from VE.

Is there a template that could be used for the construction types stated above? Particularly straw bale, or would do I just make a custom construction type using U-values found in my research so far?

In CDB you can access Standard pre-built Constructions and Materials (in CDB select the menu View >> System Constructions to see these) but if none are suitable for you then you should look to create the Constructions yourself with the u-value being the most important parameter to get right based on your data.

Do you think it would be better for me to model the building in VE and then analyse it, or is my approach of using Revit first the way you would recommend?

This is up to you really, it sounds a fairly simple model so there shouldn't be any problems with importing from Revit but at the same time you might just be faster drawing it in ModelIT as you will want to assign custom Constructions (as mentioned previously) anyway and the IESVE plug-in would just add extra data to your project that you won't be using.

In the Apache section of the tutorial it shows how to analyse the building before and after solar shading in order to compare. This works fine when using the default 'Boston' location. When I change it to Brighton, UK however my nearest weather data is Heathrow. When I try to analyse this it come up with an error saying that the coordinate don't match. Any advice?

If you are using SunCast to include accurate solar gains/shading data in your project then you have to remember to recalculate the SunCast shading results each time you change location before you can then run the Apache simulation.

This tutorial might help you get started using VE for this project http://www.iesve.com/content/mediaasset ... torial.pdf.

Phil