Comparing Building Energy Performance – New Comparison Feature in BIM Energy
Comparing building energy performance is an important step for Designers and Engineers to find ways of reducing the amount of energy used in buildings.
By using BIM Energy calculation software to determine the energy performance, engineers make decisions about the best measures to apply for any existing building or in an early phase. The software from StruSoft gives users key insights and knowledge to handle complex, mission-critical building energy analysis & design challenges.
In this interview, we explore together with our new developer Johan Anderberg, his first experience with BIM Energy and how working with features that are soon to be released, made his first weeks with us, a great experience.
Johan has joined us a month ago and since then he worked remotely during the pandemic restrictions as well as all our BIM Energy colleagues. What are some highlights of the job and how did you got used to working from home?
“I was worried about not having colleagues around me, as my previous job involved more physical activity and less remote work, but the team organizes scheduled meetings where we work together but also get a chance to know each other. Really helpful team, I like how they know the product inside-out and manage to explain the code base step by step for me to get along with.”
An important release it’s about to happen, it is an intense period for the whole development team. Can you describe one of your best experiences so far?
“I was impressed how the onboarding process evolved from the hardware setup to basic installs and before I knew it, it didn’t take long to work on the project. My concern was the complexity of the software, I never worked on something similar before. It’s amazing how these complex features are used by engineers and designers out there to calculate the potential savings in energy when there are so many parameters to change and analyse.”
What have you been working on since you joined the BIM Energy Team?
“We have created a new step to compare the energy use from multiple scenarios of a building. With this feature, the user will easily get an overview of how much energy can be saved by different renovation actions compared to the baseline building. The presentation of the comparison can be printed in a separate report and analysed along with the individual reports from the scenarios.
These reports are easily downloaded in PDFs as well as exported to text file format so that the user can access them in any format they want. Key values, such as energy usage and savings as well as the peak power of both heat and electricity supply, are included in this comparison.”
Who are these features for?
“A proper balance between the cost of high-tech materials and equipment and the reduction of whole-building energy consumption is critical when designing affordable low-energy buildings. To calculate energy demand in buildings, all designers and engineers must know and use information about the building. It concerns all companies and engineers who are in the first stages of construction but also those in renovation stages that need to analyse the energy efficiency.”
The next release is going to enable the comparison feature and its capabilities. Are there any new features to expect soon? What other capabilities will these features enable?
“We will soon integrate solar panels and users will be able to analyse the properties of the solar panel to improve the energy performance. I was impressed by how fast the dynamic core works and how easily values can be changed to see instant answers regardless of how detailed your analysis was. The speed of working in the calculation is definitely one of the key reasons for BIM Energy being such a powerful energy calculation software!”
That leads us to our final question regarding the next steps for the BIM Energy software. What should we expect from the ‘energy team’ in the following months?
“The team is expanding again with open positions for both sales, technical support and developers working to improve the software and assess new useful features. We have an exciting spring in front of us with a growing team and new useful features prepared for further releases to cover the energy calculation of even more complex buildings.”
BIM Energy uses the same calculation core as our other energy software VIP-Energy, which was one of the leading energy calculation software used in Sweden.
We owe Johan as a new joiner and the development team many thanks and appreciation for making BIM Energy the comprehensive and easy-to-use energy calculation software it is today.