The Global Archicad Community

[JamesLEDA2]

Hello,
My practice are developing our passive house expertise and as we do our modelling in ArchiCAD we were hoping to make the most of ArchiCADs capabilities in energy evaluation and PHPP export.
Has/does anyone have any guidance on this? best practice/workflow etc. would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

[Erwin Edel]

The Energy Model Review palette allows you to export to PHPP (little pop up menu under the arrow bottom left).

There is also EcoDesigner Star which you can purchase for more features.

I have next to zero experience with either, but I am sure someone with more experience can give some tips.

[JamesLEDA2]

Thanks Erwin,
Yeas I'm currently trying to decipher ArchiCADs naming for the areas in PHPP, it seems as though there is a fairly large amount of ambiguity between the naming/areas that are exported to PHPP and to understand what is what requires some back and forth!
It would be great if anyone could clarify any of this for me?

[DGSketcher]

It would be good if GS took the lead on this. I am also interested in making this work particularly now the UK government seems to be pushing us even harder into low energy design, unfortunately my previous enquiries in this forum regarding energy analysis and PHPP have proved unfruitful.

[dkovacs]

Hello,

I am not an expert in this field at all, but I asked around. First, let me bring you attention to the guides created for the energy evaluation features for further insight into them:

• Energy Evaluation Guide
• EcoDesigner STAR Guide

For this PHPP compatibility specifically, I got this input from my experts:
"ARCHICAD's Energy Evaluation and EcoDesigner STAR features are not certification or auditing tools for energy evaluation purposes. They are merely a design-aid tool for making energy-conscious design decisions.

With regards to PHPP, we are currently compatible with the PHPP v9 excel sheet. This is an extensive sheet made by PHPP used to certify passive houses which contains a lot of interrelated information. ARCHICAD can export and include some of the information needed for the PHPP certificate, but not everything.

Exporting to PHPP v9 is done directly within ARCHICAD's Energy Model Review palette, given that a proper BEM (Building Energy Model) is formed and a PHPP v9 (or older) excel template is available. When you wish to export to PHPP, a prompt asks to browse for the said PHPP excel sheet."

I hope this input helps a bit.

Regards,

[rod hughes]

Does anyone know if ArchiCAD can successfully export to Design PH2 the latest Passivhaus calculation suite? Any guidance gratefully received .

[JamesLEDA2]

Hi Rod, so DesignPH 1 & 2 are Sketchup plugins only. BIM2PH exists but crashes when I try to import IFC from ArchiCAD (no problem importing from REVIT).

to dkovacs, I would really appreciate more input from graphisoft on this, the feature is not only undersupported but wrong in what it outputs and needs correcting.

[jrmrt]

Regarding the question about DesignPH - the workflow that we have created is to create a morph of the walls, openings, and non-thermal mass, put them all on layers that can be filtered out, and then save to SketchUp. In SketchUp we then add all of the PH-specific information.

It would be great to essentially have a 'DesignPH for ArchiCAD' so that we wouldn't need to have this extra step. I know that you can write directly to Excel from ArchiCAD, but I'm not sure how to do it so that you can select specific cells to fill. I personally don't think that we will ever get to a place where we can just use the walls created for accurate energy modeling, mainly because there are some nuances that we need to do in order to accurately assess thermal conductivity. Creating morphs is the way to go for me.

In reference to the ability of exporting to PHPP using the ArchiCAD Energy Model tool, there are several issues that I have highlighted in the following post:
viewtopic.php?f=40&t=68780&start=10#p312309

Hopefully, someone will be able to address them! Thank you!