Following last month’s blog post ‘Revit 2014 Release News – New Building Performance Analysis Features’ we are very pleased to announce Revit 2014 (or more likely the Building Design Suite) is now available for download to existing Revit subscription users via the Autodesk Subscription Center. You can also download the Revit 2014 Free 30 Day full software trial.
One of the things mentioned briefly in the original post was ‘support for a range of more advanced Energy Analysis workflows’ and in particular the ‘exact specification of Building element material thermal properties’. In order to provide a little more insight into that particular capability the short video below illustrates this very simply by starting with a base run that uses the default ‘Conceptual Constructions’ which happens to have a Roof of R-value 25. Then in Revit the main Roof of the building is shown to have no thermal properties assigned to it and is then swapped for a Roof containing thermal properties giving it an R-value slightly greater than 50, twice the default. This may sound like it could save a lot of energy but what you will see from the analysis is that this actually provides only a very marginal energy saving meaning a roof closer to the default is likely already close to optimum and the cost of a higher performing roof would be better spent elsewhere or saved.
We plan to provide many more examples like this in the near future but in the meantime go ahead and start bugging your system administrator to get Revit 2014 installed so that you can start to explore these features and provide us with your feedback – we look forward to hearing from you.
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