Carbon Designer: Irish Edition

The Irish Carbon Designer, which was created in cooperation with the Irish Green Building Council, is accessible through the new 'Level(s) (IE)' tool. Users with commercial licenses have access to all the queries of the tool without any limitations, while free users get access to Carbon Designer and the Results tab.

The tool contains local generic carbon factors coming from the Life Level(s) project: "Supporting the Development of Quality Data". These are carbon factors and can not be used for other certifications such as BREEAM or LEED, since these certificates require the use of additional impact indicators.

NZEB energy scenarios were created based on data provided by IGBC and can be accessed in Carbon Designer, by selecting them in the Scenarios section

The tool does not take into account the manufacturing localisation method, regardless of LCA parameter settings. Local generic data has been provided for the most important materials that are manufactured locally, while others are typically imported. As a result, EPDs are not affected by your localisation settings either and this can lead to significant differences in results in comparison to other tools.

How do I use this feature?

Irish commercial licenses with Carbon Designer included in their license will be able to access the Irish Carbon Designer reference building in the same way other versions of Carbon Designer can be accessed. Further guidance on this can be found in our Carbon Designer: Early Design Optimization article.

Free users or those without Carbon Designer on their license currently will be able to access this by creating a new project and setting their project location to Ireland. The tool will then be made available to be selected from the license selection input

First select which building parameters you want to include, the building type, the GFA and the number of above-ground floors. Under the 'More options' section, you can also choose the number of underground floors (e.g. for parking) and specify the required foundation type and depth.

After this, select 'Calculate areas' which will populate the building structure. You can edit the building dimensions and building structures if required. If the results look acceptable you can continue and press 'Create Baseline'.

With the baseline now created, you will see the amount of CO2e displayed on the carbon breakdown page and are able to make adjustments to the various elements and materials. You can also apply a scenario to quickly change the entire structure of the building to e.g. wood, steel or concrete. Building elements can also be adjusted individually in each of the building element sections.

The changes that you make to the elements will be reflected against your baseline in the top graph. Once you're happy with any changes to the materials and building elements that you've made, you can click 'Set as baseline' to save these changes and  'Save design to query' to save the results in your design. The option to restart the design is also available if you wish to start from the beginning.

Once this has been saved to the design, you'll be able to view the results or optimise the design as required.