I’ve been giving the “wall sandwich” thing some serious thought the last couple of days and I think I can implement a workable system however it will drastically change the way I am currently doing things as well as break any sort of backwards compatibility with previous versions of the plugin and their models.
In the global settings I will probably have a select number of options you can choose from to build your custom wall sandwich (I will also have some standard ones pre-defined). Interior and Exterior walls will be different in that you cannot use wainscot and cladding with interior walls. Interior walls can be asymmetric with this new system so you can have different layers specified on each sides of the wall, unlike the current system which limits interior walls to symmetric configurations only.
Exterior Walls:
Ext. Side:
- Wainscot
- Cladding 1
- Cladding 2
- Airgap 1, 2, 3 etc…
- Sheathing 1
- Sheathing 2
- Insul 1
Int. Side:
- Gypsum 1
- Gypsum 2
- Gypsum 3
- Airgap 1,2, 3 etc…
- Sheathing 1
- Sheathing 2
- Insul 1
Interior Walls:
Ext. Side:
- Gypsum 1
- Gypsum 2
- Gypsum 3
- Airgap 1,2, 3 etc…
- Sheathing 1
- Sheathing 2
- Insul 1
Int. Side:
- Gypsum 1
- Gypsum 2
- Gypsum 3
- Airgap 1,2, 3 etc…
- Sheathing 1
- Sheathing 2
- Insul 1
The actual layering can be in any order except for wainscot which will always be the outermost layer on an ext. wall. I’m not sure that two layers of cladding are really needed for an ext. wall but I’m just throwing it out there for now and see what sticks.
As far as the framing/wall solid is concerned I only plan on having one layer for framing, if I were to change that up to a variable framing layers things would get very complicated with regards to corner configurations so it is best to not get too ambitious.
The items shown are all of the possible layers for each side of the wall in question, one could theoretically enable all of them or none of them, and the number of air gaps is probably not limited.
Am I missing anything? Thoughts?
Perhaps even this system as outlined is too rigid and somehow not flexible enough?
Your feedback now is important, once I install/implement a new wall sandwich system it will be more difficult to fundamentally change it from the form it originally takes.