Compliance check mate

Imagine being able to check a building’s design to see if it complies with the building regulations in the time it takes to make a cup of tea. Impossible? Not according to the developers of a new software tool called Carbon Checker. Southfacing Services claim that a designer can check to see if their scheme will comply with Part L2A of the building regulations in “a matter of minutes”.

The software has been developed to provide a user-friendly interface to the government’s compliance checking software, Simple Building Energy Model, or SBEM as it is commonly known. SBEM allows the designers of non-domestic buildings to demonstrate a building’s compliance with Part L2A of the Building Regulations by calculating its annual carbon impact.

To do this, the SBEM software tool compares the amount of carbon the proposed building will emit – the Building Emission Rate (BER) – against a Target Emission Rate (TER). The building must also comply with a set of minimal elemental standards for the building fabric and services standards, limit the potential for overheating, be constructed as described in the energy calculation and provide ongoing information of energy usage.

Design input

Until now, one of the biggest challenges the industry has faced has been inputting the design information through the government’s clunky interface module iSBEM. But with the introduction of Carbon Checker, data input to SBEM is set to get a whole lot easier.

According to Southfacing’s IT director Mark Thompson, the Carbon Checker interface will “significantly improve on the standard Microsoft Access-based iSBEM interface to SBEM provided by DCLG (Department of Communities and Local Government)”. He says the new interface means data entry is so quick and easy that all sectors of industry should be able to use it. And because data entry is so fast, the software will allow several different iterations of a building design to be modelled to help optimise its design against Part L2A.

What is more, Carbon Checker has now been accredited by DCLG as an official interface to SBEM version 1.1.a, so it also provides an official output that can be included within a Building Control submission. And the developers state that all future versions of SBEM will be incorporated into the interface.

A quick demonstration shows that the biggest improvement over iSBEM is in the entry of a building’s geometry. Rather than entering the data as numbers in text boxes, the user describes the building using geometric shapes in a 2D/3D graphical interface. You can either build a model from scratch or enter a building’s geometry by tracing over CAD (DXF) drawings. The software also features ‘intelligent snapping’ to help with tracing over drawings. For those proficient with computer aided design packages, this should enable results on complex buildings within a matter of minutes.

For those less computer savvy, a project wizard guides non-technical users through model set-up, data entry and information on wall and door constructions, for example. Compliance buttons down the left hand side turn from red to green as the necessary information is completed; guidance is provided if certain values are missing.

Other features include a global glazing geometry setting that allows different glazing scenarios to be tested quickly, such as 50% glass on all south-facing facades; and a comparison facility to allow different models to be compared to help identify the most cost effective way of achieving Part L compliance.

Future developments will see automatically generated suggestions on design optimisations and tools to assess the contribution from the low and zero carbon technologies.