Global Parameters for LEED calculations

[janunson]

I'm looking for advice on this. Preparing to create a glazing library for the office..... with a twist.
We do a lot of LEED work. (http://www.usgbc.org/LEED/LEED_main.asp)
this requires a lot of extra calculation, which Revit excels at helping with. two calculations in particular that i'm interested in attempting. First is more realistic than the second, i think.

1. Tablulate area of vision and daylight glazing:
i need to have a table of every room in the building (easy), its square footage (easy) and the square footage of glazing in that room (not so easy).. and here's the thing, i have to count two separate areas of glazing, A: the glazing between 2'6 and 7'6 a.f.f. and B: all other glazing... also i have to count glazing of translucent panels and tinted glass separately from clear glass.

I'm thinking about adding some custom global parameters for this, but i'd love to be able to have my window family calculate this area automatically. I can imagin naming some dimensions, making some formulas, etc. so i think this can be done. Any suggestions for making this work smoothely? what happens if someone downloads a window family that doesn't have the additional paramters? will it cook my schedule, or will it just show up blank?

2. I also have to calculate what percentage of the room has line-of-site to vision glass (that between 2'6 and 7'6 a.f.f.) .
I have no idea if there's a way to coax Revit into doing this in a schedule without a LOT of workarounds, (maybe useing the area plan tools, and drawing the line-of-site manually?) or if i should put this on the wish list instead.

[PeterJ]

I think you will find this quite taxing. In theory you can mess around with parameters and formulae to work out the aea of a window, with some extra care you will get glazing instead of window opening. The cill dimension ought to allow you to also work out a split in areas above and below a fixed pane, but the cill height becomes a nominal default height and the actual cill height is controlled as an instance parameter so it is less easy to read and parameterise.

You could get round it in one of two fashions, neither of which I have been so kind as to try.......

1 Each family type is installed at its default install height and if you need to vary this rather than do it as an instance you create a different family type with a new default cill height, the you could work up a parametric means of doing the area calcs above and below your reference plane.

2 Change the windows to generic families, but I think that will really only let you do much the same as option 1.

Good luck

P

[bclarch]

Sounds pretty challenging. You might want to submit this to Revit support and see what they can come up with.

[Scott D Davis]

I would be very interested in your findings on this topic. We have LEED certified architects in our office, and many clients are insisting that their projects are LEED certified buildings. Los Angeles Unified School District is one of them. All new construction in LA Unified must get at least the lowest level of LEED. If Revit can do these calcs on the fly....WOW! We could make a change, and automatically see how it affects the point totals that determine LEED.

I have no experience so far with the ODBC export, but I believe it reports all of the areas you mentioned. You may want to look into building a database table, that gets populated with data from a Revit ODBC export, to produce the calculations you are looking for.

Let me know how it goes!

[gregcashen]

While we're at it, can we maybe get Title 24 Compliance reports generated on the fly out of Revit?

Sorry, just a Cally thing, I'll go back to my hole now :roll:

[Scott D Davis]

no joke....I think we could!

[gregcashen]

Maybe YOU could. My Access and VBA skills go only so far!

[Scott D Davis]

when I said "we" what I meant was "someone else"!!!! :D

[PeterJ]

Glad to see you never got so far as to have to unlearn what you have learned, Scott!!

[gregcashen]

when I said "we" what I meant was "someone else"!!!! :D

Ahhh, yes. Well, then "we" should get together very soon and implement a solution for the good of the Revit community!

[janunson]

can you post a website where i can find out what title 24 compliance entails?

[gregcashen]

It's a california thing...energy requirements for new buildings. Shouldn't concern you, but if you are interested, check out:

www.energy.ca.gov/title24/