Overview

There may be situations where you require a large number of rooms in a project but are met with system constraints, such as number of rooms in v25 or the surface limit in SBEM. The following techniques can be used for Steady State calculations.

• v25 has an upper limit of 1000 rooms. v26 has an upper limit of approximately 32000 rooms.
• The SBEM calculation engine used in the PartL program has trouble with a large number of rooms/surfaces. Due to this, this document may still be relevant to v26 projects
• Where a project has a large number of rooms, consideration of this document can save a lot of unnecessary work in the CAD input method.

It is strongly recommended that you back up project before continuing with this document.

Method

You should have your project in a state where all unique floors and at least on example of floors that can be duplicated are extant.  In the instances where you have drawn more floors than you require, you should delete the duplicate floors.

In this project the ground floor and top floor are unique and contain no rooms that can make use of the multiplier. Floors 1 through 4 have the same layout and design conditions so are ideal for using the multiplier

From our model, we can delete floors 2, 3, and 4 as they are duplicates of the 1st floor. This will leave us with unique floors only; Ground floor, 1st floor and top floor.

The next step is to break out of CAD input mode and apply room multipliers where applicable.

You may wish to make a further back up of your project at this stage

To break out of CAD input mode you should close CAD Input and select the Room Data option from the main Design Database menu. When first selected you will be presented with a warning letting you know you will be turning of CAD input. Un-tick the option and then select OK in the dialog that appears.

Once this is done you will be presented with a list of rooms in the project rather than the warning message.

If CAD Input mode is broken out of, you should be aware of a number of limitations.
Please see this document for further information

From the available rooms, select one of the rooms you wish to apply a multiplier to. In this instance, room 11 is one of the rooms that can be multiplied for floors 2, 3 and 4.

Once the room is selected, click on the Room Data tab and enter the required multiplier in the highlighted input box. Click back to Select room to save your changes and then select the other rooms you wish to apply a multiplier to, and continue modifying the Room multiplier accordingly.