You may have used carbon footprint calculators or ecological footprint calculators; now there is one for calculating your water footprint, too.
The Calculator gives you an estimate of the total amount of water you use, what is called your water footprint. The Calculator takes into account not only the water used in your home, but also the water used to produce the food you eat and the products you buy. Your water footprint includes other factors such as water utilized to cool power plants that provide your electricity, and water saved when you recycle. You may not drink, feel or see this water, but it makes up the great majority of your water footprint.
This calculator works only in the US though but there are links provided for similar calculators that work with worldwide locations even though they are not as neat to use.
This is a neat study tool that I came accross lately: “LeedVisual synthesizes difficult information about LEED NC credit into easy to understand and memorizable pictoral format.”
See www.leedvisual.com for more ..
The global integrated design firm, Perkins+Will launched the 2030 e2 Energy Estimating Tool. This free online tool was created to assist Perkins+Will’s designers in designing buildings to achieve the 2030 challenge. Specifically, 2030 e2 allows users to set target goals for four key areas: energy efficiency, green power offsets, on-site renewable energy, and grid-supplied renewable energy when designing new buildings or retrofitting existing buildings. In response to the urgency of global climate change, Perkins+Will has decided to make the beta tool publicly available. “Perkins+Will is committed to meeting the 2030 Challenge and has proactively built the estimating tool to support our designers as they strive to achieve the Challenge reduction goals,” said Doug Pierce, Perkins+Will Senior Associate, AIA, LEED AP®. “We created an easy-to-use tool that would help us set energy goals to comply with all aspects of the design phase and meet the benchmarks of the 2030 Challenge. The data it provides is highly useful, so it made sense to us to make this tool publicly available for everyone’s benefit.” Perkins+Will is dedicated to promoting sustainable design and educating the industry about green building and its importance. The 2030 e2 is one of a series of knowledge-based contributions the firm has made to the wider industry. The Perkins+Will Green Operations Plan, which details specific firm practices for running a sustainable business, was the first such contribution. The beta-version of the 2030 e2 Estimating Tool is available for anyone to use at http://2030e2.perkinswill.com.
Release 4.0 now provides users with the ability to model projects in Europe with accurate European weather files. Default country-wide utility costs have been included for countries in which data from the Energy Information Administration exists.
With this new release, the Green Building Studio web service introduces new add-in tools for Autodesk Revit MEP 2010 and Revit Architecture 2010, plus the Green Building Studio desktop tool, for uploading any valid gbXML file to the web service.
For more information see the Green Builidng Studio 4.0 relase notes …
The Carbon Neutral Design Project offers a survey of currently available energy tools amongst other resources. The Carbon Neutral Design (CND) Project is a joint effort by the AIA, members of AIA Committee on the Environment (COTE), and the Society of Building Science Educators (SBSE) to produce educational and resource materials for carbon neutral design. The purpose of which is to provide practitioners, faculty and students with the means to meet the 2030 Challenge — that is, to be able to design and construct buildings to a state of carbon neutrality by the year 2030.
The work included in this web resource is the result of a committed effort from educators and practitioners and is an attempt to begin to define a working methodology for Carbon Neutral Design that will be of general benefit to the profession. IT IS A WORK IN PROGRESS, A BEGINNING. There are pieces of the site that are incomplete at present. These will be filled in over the next few months. Please check back periodically for more content.
Go to The Carbon Neutral Design Project to find out more …
“RevPac is a new set of productivity tools for Revit. For this initial release of RevPac the concentration will be on user interface enhancements. Later, tools to automate common tasks and streamline existing tasks will be added. Please email your suggestions to the developers as most features are going to be user driven.” This Add-on adds several toolbars, a toolbar maanger and a toolbar editor.
Go to CADwerx for more
Autodesk has released a new whitepaper on the benefits of using the new conceptual design tools in Revit Architecture 2010.
This white paper details how CASE Design, a design technology consultancy based in New York City, used the new conceptual design tools to more easily create massing designs, explore design alternatives, and address various environmental, constructability, and aesthetic concerns.
Read more on designreform.net
“50 something architects, designers, engineers, consultants and construction professionals just attended the inaugural meeting of the newly formed Seattle Ecotect User Group. This meeting, sponsored by IMAGINiT and Callison Architecture was held at the Seattle offices of Skanska.
A presentation and model sharing was given by Teresa Burrelsman of Callison, discussing the need for quick design simulation during a schematic design for a new tower in the city of Riyadh, and showing how Ecotect was used to determine energy cost savings and occupant comfort (especially reducing glare) by various schemes using shading devices. There was some discussion of these quick, down and dirty, ’shoebox models’ and how invaluable they can be to drive design iteration.
Olivier Pennetier of Symphysis, a leading regional Ecotect consultant, joined by phone from his office in San Francisco and offered advice on modeling practices, as well as providing food for thought on how the community can begin to share information learned from the informal conversations these types of meetings generate.”
Read more on the Sean D Burke Consulting Blog …
If you live in the Greater Vancouver Area you might be interestd to see what the Vancouver Ecotect User Group is up to?
How could a butterfly inspire your next design? Opening keynote Janine Benyus presented the Biomimicry Institute’s new initiative www.AskNature.org at Living Future 09. AskNature is a searchable database of thousands of Nature’s best strategies and ideas–a valuable resource for applying biomimicry to building designs and strategies.
A database link tool is now available at Autodesk Labs:
The RDBLink tool allows the user to export data from the elements in a Revit project and maintain relationships against data that exists outside of Revit. The tool allows for both import and export of the project data and will allow the user to make changes on the database side that affect the data within the project once imported. Also, during subsequent exports of the data to the same database, only data from the project will be affected, so any new fields or tables added to the database for your own purposes will remain intact along side the newly exported data. The RDBLink import tool provides a grid view of the data to allow the user to make any final edits before import. This grid control also allows the user to create Revit Shared Parameters which will add new fields for those parameters to the database in the related tables. Changes to these new fields within the database will update these Revit Shared Parameters upon future imports.
Supported Applications
- Autodesk Revit Architecture 2009 or 2010
- Autodesk Revit Structure 2009 or 2010
- Autodesk Revit MEP 2009 or 2010
Supported database platforms
- Supported databases when running under 32 bit: MS Access 2003/2007 and SQL Server 2005/2008.
- Supported databases when running under 64 bit: SQL Server 2005/2008.
