Part L 2010 and 2013

Hi Andrew

It would appear you have hit the SBEM engine surface limit. While Design Database can handle up to 32,000+ rooms and a practically infinite amount of surfaces, the SBEM calculation engine is very limited in what can handle.

There are a couple of things you can do, however, that should help.  First of all ensure you take a backup copy of your project.

Firstly, you can combine rooms that are on the same floor and façade, and with the same design conditions. So essentially you end up with one large bedroom along each façade. This is unlikely to help with large projects.

Secondly, there is the option to use the room multiplier. This document explains this process.  

Regards,

Hi Duncan, this has worked for Part L 2013.  When I run Part L 2010 I am having this problem (see below).  I am getting this for all rooms.  In the example below I have only run the SBEM calculation for one room.

Hi Andrew - the software isn't really designed to be run like this for comparison purposes. We have included PartL 2010 for legacy projects that may need to be lodged with 2010. Once a project is run in PartL 2013, there are no guarantees that the data set for PartL 2010 will be wholly complete.

What type of building/room do you have defined for the above example?

Regards,

Hi Duncan,

The building is set up as C2 Residential Universities and College, that particular room was set up as an eating/drinking area.

So If I want a Part L 2010 model it would be better to set up a model for Part L 2010 rather than run Part L 2010 from a Part L 2015 model?

Thanks again,

Hi Andrew 

Its a little more complicated than starting a PartL 2010 project, I'm afraid. This might be quite a long answer!

Firstly, the reason why your PartL 2010 calculation failed is PartL 2010 doesn't recognise the room type. If you examine the C2 Residential Universities and College room list in V26 you will see maybe 20 room types. In V25 - the original version we released with PartL 2010 - there are only two room types; Tea Making and Common Room. PartL 2010 simply doesn't know that the extra room types introduced with V26/PartL 2013 exist.

Secondly, we update the software regularly to include the latest SBEM/PARTL. It did come as a surprise, however, when DCLG/BRE released a final update to PartL 2010. At that point we had to make a decision as to whether to continue updating V25, or to include the 2010 calculation in V26. As its confusing to have two versions of the software available, we decided to include 2010 in V26 instead of keeping the legacy V25 software going for the sake of a tool that would get less and less use as time went on.

The inclusion of 2010 in V26 is mainly for legacy/V25 projects that are still live. It allows the user to only need to install one version of the software (the latest) and still make "as built" changes and lodge the project. It would be unlikely that any new 2010 projects would be started at this point. If so, great care would be needed to avoid pitfalls like the one above.

This also leads onto the final thing - comparisons between 2010 and 2013 are essentially...not much use. The SBEM calculation engine has changed a lot in the intervening time, from room types that didn't exist in 2010 to different and more HVAC options, to 2013 making the EPC much harder to pass.

Sure...you can still create a 2010 project from scratch -  if you're very careful - but I don't see any benefit from doing so.

regards,