Solar Panel Rendering

As a plumbing designer and installer, I have been struggling to convey to the customer what their project will look like in the after the installation. For some reason or another, photos of existing installations just don’t do the trick. Another hurdle that I have recently overcome was designing the solar arrays on a building that doesn’t even exist yet. The structural team needed a layout of the arrays on the roof to properly design the structural reinforcement needed to accommodate the new weight of the panels and added snow loads. Ordinarily to calculate the number of solar panels and location you need to first determine the amount of solar shading that you will receive in a given location. The Solar Pathfinder has been the tool of choice in the solar industry for years, but you need the physical site to utilize the tool. I currently use AutoCAD MEP 2010 for all my piping plans for coordination and submittal of construction documents. The software comes with a multitude of tools to help visualize the end product of your system. This gave me the inspiration to use this to consider the physical and esthetic attributes that the panels can have to a building’s architecture. With a picture you are only limited to a display from one point of view. Being able to model the objects in 3D, apply geographical information to the model, along with a date and to jazz it up little some materials you are able to render a very realistic picture of what the project will look like. When the customer decides that they want to see what it would look like from a different point of view or you decide there is not enough sunlight in your location you can move objects around or create and create a different view or create a video.






Proposed Solar Array Layout for UW Milwaukee's New Dorms

This would be the sun at 11:00 on 4-24-09.

"It Aint Easy Being Green?"

With the new construction industry focusing on energy savings more than ever, as plumbers we are becoming forced into keeping up with the latest trends in energy conservation. When being energy efficient was a perk to a project it meerly became a matter of price. Most of the time it was more expensive to build houses with higher efficiency ratings than conventional building practices would achieve. Solar thermal energy has really taken off in the plumbing industry to compliment the growth in energy efficient buildings. Integrating solar domestic water heat with a primary water heating system has never been so advantageous. In most cases the cost of the installation is offset drastically through rebates offered through local utilities and federal tax incentives. When taking into consideration the incentive programs, tax incentives, inflation and the increase in energy costs a solar water heating system typically pays for itself in energy saved in 10-15 years. The typical life expectancy of a system is approx 30 years and in our climate we can expect to offset approx. 50% of our combined annual water heating costs.

I believe now more than ever is the time to consider implementing a solar water heating system into your new or existing house. Nobody is certain but eventually I believe that the utility companies and incentive companies are going to start running dry on their funds. In addition to a lack of funds it may no longer be a option for long not to integrate solar energy into your house.

Autodesk Quantity Take Off

Back in June Autodesk released its version of a bill of material program to use in conjunction with DWF's. For several years Autodesk's third party add-ons like Quickpen and CAD MECH have included this with their program but for a hefty price. I recieved a trial version of QTO (Quantity Take Off) shortly after it was released and was disappointed. I expected to be able to export my 3D DWF to the program and have it spit out a material list, thus justifying the $1995.00 price tag. The program seemed to be able to pick up on pipe fittings and their quantities pretty well but pipe and pipe lengths were another story. So far there is not much support for the product being so new but the Autodesk rep. had some work-arounds and assured me that the glitches would be taken care of in the next release. The program had some good features that allowed you to assign monetary values for each of the items to produce a cost associated with your BIM and BOM.

Before I pulled my hair out with the program pulled my hair out with scheduling inside of AutoCAD MEP 2008. Once I figured out how to properly setup a schedule using property data sets calculating the materials was a breeze. This method had some hiccups in it as well. To schedule pipe lengths and add their totals up and give you a sum the easiest way I could find was to isolate each pipe size and the create a schedule for every size. The only way you could isolate pipes based on their size was to have all the piping into one drawing which made my machine puke on several occasions. The fittings and MvParts were no problem to schedule. I could even schedule them through xrefs and the schedules updated when changes were made. When I schedule piping through xrefs it would spit out on large table with only a sum of all pipe in the drawing instaed of a sum of each specific size. I think the next release of QTO will be benificial to purchase, but for know I will continue to pull my hair out with only one program. I found a clip on You Tube with Brian Haines giving a demonstration as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q90ynbvQo40

AutoCad MEP 2009 SP1

I downloaded SP1 the other day and to my dismay some crippling issues still were not resolved.
1) When you edit a piping through an xref in place the piping does not stay connected to the fittings attached. Normally when using the grip edits (the largest advantage to MEP), all the fitting move with the pipe and you then have sucessfully been more productive than vanilla CAD drafting practices, in 2009.... "not so much".

2) This was not necerssarily an issue resulting from 2009 but I thought it would be worth mentioning: Adding Mvparts, there should be an option similiar to pipe adding to lock elevation. Most of the time I find myself having to go back in and change the elevations after the equipment placed.

If any of you out there have any other Beefs let me know.