quickSAP Home Energy Modelling plugin for Sketchup has been created by BWP Architects, an archtectural practice based in Farnham, Surrey who specialise in new-build energy efficient homes and we’ve been using SketchUp as our main 3D modelling software for over 15 years and have a wealth of extensions and add-ons to maximise productivity and presentation work.

One extension has elluded us though; a way of interrogating energy efficiency of early outline sketch models. We have been looking for a quick and simple way to test design choices to see the potential impact of these on carbon emissions, SAP results and Energy Performance Certificates. We’ve come across various potential solutions to this over the years but all are expensive, require huge amounts of data input, are focussed on minutia to obtain a definitive answer and seem to be written by environmental scientists rather than what we need, a solution that is tailored to architects and designers looking for responsive feedback with a way of making on-the-fly changes and getting instant comparative results.

So we’ve built our own….

Follow these links to purchase your licence or to download the free trail.

We wanted to avoid the need to create the model, export the data, open up yet another software programme, see the results, go back to Sketchup, make changes, export the data… blah blah! It was important that the calculations and changes could all be handled within Sketchup itself and changes could be made quickly, easily and give instant feedback. How many times have you had to go back to the SAP Assessor and ask for a change to see if adding an extra couple of PV panels or switching half the windows to triple glazed is enough to reduce the CO₂ emissions by another 5% and get you to where you needed to be?

When we decided to create our own extension and the quickSAP Home Energy Modelling suite of tools we didn’t realise just how many months it would take to first learn how to build an Sketchup extension, then how to write ruby code to extract information from a 3D model and then how to code to use that data in a mindblowing number of calculations and all without leaving Sketchup.

To learn more about BWP Architects please go to our home page here.