What is the Carbon Designer for Ireland?
The Carbon Designer tool is a simple way to estimate the carbon impact of your project at an early stage of building design. The tool is free and quickly shows you the differences you can make to the overall carbon impact by selecting different material build ups of large elements such as walls, floors and roof. This is key because it is at the earliest stages that many of the big, most impactful decisions are made. If you get the whole design team to understand the approach at an early stage, you get better buy-in and co-operation. The Carbon Designer helps you do that.
Why was it developed?
Addressing whole life carbon is critical to reach carbon neutrality, but Whole Life Carbon calculation is complex and often takes place later in the design process. At that stage, it may not be possible to change some of the design decisions that have the greatest influence on carbon emissions.
We worked with OneClickLCA to develop the Carbon Designer for Ireland tool to give good estimations of outcomes right at the beginning when only a rough size and shape of a building are known. The tool includes build ups common in the Irish market, and some alternatives.
How do I use the Carbon Designer?
To make it quick and simple to use, we tried to balance the variety of options with accessibility. You can start with as little information as only the Gross Floor Area and the number of storeys. Input these into the tool and it will estimate the volumes of materials you are going to need for your building. Then pick the likely materials and build-ups from dropdown lists and adjust them to reflect your ideas as closely as possible. The carbon impacts of each element are updated in real-time and displayed in the bar charts at the top of the page.
With your free account, you can create, edit and save as many designs as you wish, and generate reports.
Download step-by-step instructions here or watch this recorded demo.
How do I generate a report?
A report template pre-populated with your data is available under More Actions > Report. It outlines all the materials and assumptions made in the analysis, but still requires editing and checking before you can share with a client.
What else do I need to know?
Keep in mind this is an early-stage planning tool to help you estimate likely outcomes, demonstrate the differences in impacts of different materials and show clients simple bar charts to compare.
For more detailed and flexible analysis you have to link to a follow-on licence so the user can be more specific. This is a OneClick tool outside the scope of the Carbon Designer.
Check the Carbon Designer now!
The Carbon Designer for Ireland tool was developed by the Irish Green Building Council, and OneClickLCA, with support from the Land Development Agency (LDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
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