Monday, May 1, 2017

Autodesk Insight 360 - Walls; Part 7

As a follow up to my previous Insight 360 post, Autodesk Insight 360 - Walls; Part 6, it is helpful to know what happens when a Revit wall element does not have a thermal value (or one that is too low).

This only applies when Detailed Elements is checked in the Energy Setting > Advanced Energy Settings dialog,


If a material does not have a Thermal asset, it will not contribute to the wall assemblies thermal properties. Notice here, in the image below, that a Thermal asset may be deleted, The adjacent buttons allow a Thermal asset to be copied or replaced with another property.

  • For example, a wood stud wall could have the Thermal properties of batt insulation applied in place of the wood studs, which has much lower thermal properties alone. The drawback is that this trick does not account for the batt insulation in material take offs, but does not affect the total wall thickness either.


In this example, using the model from the previous post, I removed all the thermal assets associated with the materials used by the exterior wall as seen in the image below.


When I push the EAM out to Insight 360 I get an email stating that an error occurred and the model could not be processed. Notice, in the next image, the indication is that wall is too thin or the thermal properties are too low.


Once a model is in Insight 360 it is possible to select a surface and see "aim" number. If this were a large complex project with just a few walls causing the problem, I am not sure if there is a way to dial in quickly using this number.

Creating a schedule like the one below would be the best bet, looking for exterior walls with low or no thermal resistance.