Vectorworks, Energos & Design PH – Part 2

Following on from THIS POST on Vectorworks, Energos & Passivhaus, as promised here’s a little more information on the functions and a comparison to Sketchup DesignPH…

Design PH (http://www.designph.org/) is a 3D interface (Using SketchUp) specifically for Passivhaus & PHPP.

Effectively you build your Sketchup 3D model as you would normally but use the specific DesignPH tools to input and extract the data.

The video below from the Design PH website explains in more detail:

Below are a couple of screen-grabs that show the tools and the main interface (don’t look at the model or data too closely, still testing):

Design PH and Vectorworks Energos are very similar in concept in that the construction is fully modelled in 3D and then assigned material & location etc data in accordance with Passivhaus parameters. The principle difference (as far as I can see) is that:

• The compliance check occurs directly within Vectorworks Energos whereas
• Design PH exports it’s data to PHPP for Verification & Compliance
• Although Vectorworks Energos does export via CSV and TXT files, it’s not in a format directly usable by PHPP

Design PH has already proven very popular with PHPP users, principally helped by the popularity and ease of use of SketchUp and its ability to model quickly and effectively in 3D.

You can see a Movie preview of Vectorworks Energos below:

You can read more about Vectorworks Energos HERE

HERE is the Vectorworks Help file on the Energos modules

I thought I could cover this topic in 2 posts but it’s going to have to stretch over to a third. This will cover my opinion & conclusion…