Since 2021, Mace Group has been using the IESVE on all of its public sector projects, amounting to over 70 projects so far. The technology has become an integral part of its assessments for all frameworks and projects related to the public sector.
For the Mace team, the IESVE has been essential to proving the many benefits of key strategies like mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, hot water heat recovery, generating BRUKL reports, calculating PV generation, assessing the risk of overheating and more. They use many of the IESVE applications to carry out assessments and find the ease of integration between all of the applications highly beneficial.
Mace use the IESVE application ModelIT to import geometry directly from Revit Models using gbXML files. After employing the Revit tick box with common issues, the speed of creating model geometry improved dramatically. Model geometry that would take around 2 days to be completed traditionally, was done in around 4 hours using geometry import. This was helped also by the Mace modelling team working closely with their team of in-house architects to explain the common issues causing errors in the import.
Within the Apache application, Mace created typical profiles for all of the building types including schools, prisons, barracks, healthcare centres and others. These profiles were used together with a gbXML file to save more than 50% of the time to retrieve the analysis results.
Using SunCast Mace has produced graphical outputs evaluating different shapes and angles of roofs to present to clients the efficiency of installing PV panels.
The Mace team has used MacroFlo extensively together with the Monodraught HTM plugin to assess the severity of the overheating on multiple school sites.
Whilst the VistaPro application has been used to analyse the data and present results in the cases of existing buildings which were overheating. Mace was appointed by their client to understand why and how to deal with the issues using the IESVE application suite.
Additionally, IESVE enables the Mace modelling team to support the wider group effort with energy assessments. Recently they assisted Mace Construct with the bid for a package of school refurbishments where they were able to accurately assess the percentage carbon and energy reduction for multiple energy measures including fabric improvements and changing heating strategy.
Using the preset report templates within IESVE Mace can easily pull together Energy Use Intensity reporting, TM52 and TM59 reports which they use on every project. The clarity of the graphical results, for example, SunCast Solar Gains in W/m², Energy Use Intensity Reports allow Mace’s clients and colleagues to easily understand them.
“Using IESVE has enabled us to reduce time spent and create a set of typical designs that can be carried from project to project. The visual output and VistaPro interface serve well in identifying any of the design issues. In general, these tools are very helpful to both clients and assessors.
Of great benefit is also the integration between Revit, IESVE and OneClick LCA, which means we can now use IESVE to streamline embodied carbon calculations as part of the work for our Net Zero Carbon working group.”
Juraj Rusnak, Mechanical Engineer, Mace Group