DesignLCA is a free plugin for Archicad that easily allows you to calculate LCA on your BIM project from early sketching. –The best thing is that you don’t even have to be a LCA expert
The climate is under tremendous pressure. And since the building industry is responsible for around 30% of our overall carbon emissions, we need to make a change, and design buildings with a smaller carbon footprint.
This requires us to assess how building materials are manufactured, the amount of energy we use to operate our buildings, how many resources we use on maintenance, and what happens to building materials when the building no longer is in use. This holistic view that takes all environmental factors into account – aka a life cycle assessment – is the only way to truly transform the building industry.
Building Information Modelling is ideal for calculating Life Cycle Assessments. Taking advantage of the 3D-model, a rich set of sustainability information, energy simulation and some basic calculation, DesignLCA provides you with the overall carbon footprint of your building project. This allows you to design climate friendly buildings that puts the least amount of pressure on our shared planet.
DesignLCA calculates the Global Warming Potential and provides an Early Stage LCA directly in Archicad, including CO2e from building materials, doors, windows, and the energy consumption from operations over a given period.
"At Lendager, we have been looking for an intuitive and dynamic LCA tool for a long time. We have sought a tool that gives us an overview of a buildings' climate performance and CO2 footprint in ‘real time’, so that we are able to measure the carbon footprint while we design and test different solutions."
Anders Lendager, founding partner at Lendager.
DesignLCA calculates U-values and simulates the energy consumption from the building's operations directly on the 3D model, which no other LCA calculators are able to. – By using BIM to calculate LCA, you don’t have to enter the quantities manually.
DesignLCA comes with a number of pre-set materials with sustainability data so you don't have to fiddle with EPDs or be an LCA expert. This means that you can use LCA as a design tool from the early sketching stages.
Download DesignLCA for free and start building more sustainable buildings today.
Behind the scenes
DesignLCA is a plugin to Archicad 26 (build 4019) and later versions, that can be used on Mac and Window platforms.
DesignLCA contains a Property Set that adds functionality for measuring CO2 for doors and windows.
DesignLCA comes with a manual that shows you how easy it is to get started with the LCA calculations.
With DesignLCA, you can read the LCA result directly in the software or save the result as an Excel file.
DesignLCA is developed by Lendager Architects and Formfaktor Aps.
Disclaimer:
DesignLCA is free for everyone to use. Formfaktor does not offer end user help or support. Bug reporting and suggestions can be sent to info@formfaktor.dk.
Formfaktor takes no responsibility for bugs or errors in DesignLCA, and we are not responsible for errors in the LCA calculation on projects where DesignLCA is used. To achieve the best result, always make sure that the BIM project is correctly modeled and to check that all settings in Archicad, EcoDesigner STAR and DesignLCA are correctly set before starting the LCA calculation.
Use of DesignLCA is entirely on your own risk.
All illustrations show projects from Lendager Architects in Archicad.