I am an building energy assessor in WA. I am interested to know if Sefaira is used in Australia to model energy compliance to satisfy the National Construction Code (NCC) 2019, volume 1 (i.e. commerical). Is this a software package that I purchase learn, create of model and report for compliance or is this a service provide by Sefaira/sketchup/trimble for projects, My interest is in the commercial construction only. I have other Nather’s software for residential energy compliance.
Where do I start?
Hi @uwhitr1,
I’ll defer to users in Australia to chime in but what might be helpful to know is that Sefaira is an early stage energy & daylight modeling tool and therefore not particularly used for compliance. Sefaira runs on Energyplus as the background energy modeling engine. Energyplus is the US Department of Energy’s flagship product with regards to energy modeling and is widely accepted as a tool for compliance here in the US.
With a SketchUp model, Sefaira will create an Energyplus input file with logical defaults for the envelope, space use parameters (i.e., ASHRAE baselines) and standard HVAC systems (Appendix G) which you can edit, and create your own baselines inside of Sefaira. Certain inputs are made available to you but not all that might be required for a full blown energy compliance model. This is where you can download the Energyplus input file and run with it so to speak.
Sefaira is a software package that comes with the SketchUp Studio bundle that you can purchase, learn, create a model and run Energy + Daylight analysis on. A good resource to maybe get a sense of the capabilities would be this Sefaira playlist on Youtube.
Hope this helps.