Why was this analysis needed?
As healthcare facilities go, hospitals are quite hungry in terms of energy consumption. First of all, they need temperature control and lights 24 hours a day, every day, without break. Add the extra machinery and ventilation, sterilization, kitchen, laundry and whatnot to that amount and it gets quite massive.
The location where this hospital is located adds to the bill as it is quite cold and wet, and that is absolutely not what you need inside a hospital. The heating and dehumidifying of each room need to be backed up with efficient insulation and passive systems. Anything that can make the energy consumption lower, without affecting the healthcare, is welcome.
Why GreenspaceLive?
Based out of Isle of Lewis in Scotland, GreenspaceLive is a spin-off of the renowned low-carbon footprint environment friendly construction and renewable energy research company, Greenspace Research. Born in 2008 in the Lewis Castle College, the firm uses SketchUp to draw up building plans and uses many great plugins developed by themselves to analyze and suggest changes to the energy usage and other environment-related issues of buildings.
Primary Methodology
The basic idea behind the energy analysis and change suggestion was first capturing the building plan in SketchUp as a model, and then using the proprietary extensions to perform energy analysis on that model.
The tools GreenspaceLive used were gTools suite running on SketchUp Pro to build up the model, gModeller to make the energy analysis, and gEnergy for the energy performance rating. Once done, the model with the energy data was uploaded to Google Earth to present to the client. They used gDashboard for the presentation as well, to clearly represent the data. The team in charge of the project used gWorkspace to collaborate.
Published By
Arka Roy
www.sketchup4architect.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~