BWP Architects quickSAP Sketchup Extension for Home Energy Modelling

We 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….

The quickSAP Home Energy Modelling plugin is now available as a 14 day free trial, a 60 day licence or a 365 day licence; designed by architects for architects and designers!

To purchase your licence or to download the free trail please visit the download page here.

The quickSAP Home Energy Modelling suite of plugin tools for Sketchup includes the automation of assigning walls, roofs, windows, floors, etc to the correct faces, the automation of assigning the right thermal bridges codes to the right edges, and collecting a minimal amount of user input data to produce detailed and accurate energy calculations and results.

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.

quickSAP suite of plugin extensions is now available as a free 14 day free trial – email quicksap@bwparchitects.com or see our dedicated page here for details of the different licences available and the costs.

Please download the short introductory explanation file here.

If you have any questions or feedback please drop us a line at quicksap@bwparchitects.com

Keep an eye out for our announcement later this year for the RdSAP_Tool for the Reduced Data SAP style assessments and indicative EPC banding for existing buildings directly from a simple Sketchup Model!