Building Thermal Performance Assessing explained:

A building thermal performance assessment also known as a House Energy Rating makes it easier to boost the environmental performance of new house designs and ensure compliance with the appropriate sustainability regulation or assessment scheme.

BERS Pro is an energy rating tool accredited with the Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme (NatHERS) and approved to rate the thermal performance of residential dwellings in Australia.

Building details are entered via a graphics based interface from plans into the software to obtain heating and cooling energy levels that will be needed for a home to stay naturally cool in summer and warm in winter.

The building details entered into the BERS Pro software encompass all elements of the buildings construction, fabrication and dimensional layout. This process involves the placement of all the building elements directly onto a scaled background image of the floor plans. In this way all rooms on the plans are assigned their individual names, functions and construction elements.

All elements of a dwelling are taken into account eg. door and window positions, floor coverings and ventilation.
Once the assessment has been completed, the heating and cooling loads for individual rooms can be examined and more informed decisions can be made about the types of heating and cooling systems required, as well as the levels of insulation or glazing.

 

The ability to look at the results of simulating a single room to assess its percentage of the total heating and cooling energy required, highlights which rooms need more attention with regards to achieving a better thermal performance outcome for the whole dwelling.

The software simulates the appropriate climate zone over 1 year of weather conditions taking into account the orientation of the dwelling according to where it is located on the climate map embeded into the software, this gives a complete picture of the heating and cooling required over a full years climate cycle.

 

Within the BERs Pro software package all the individual elements that make up the whole building structure have multiple choices for material selection available for simulation. For example, glazing options can be selected from current manufacturers specifications and different insulation layouts and options can be selected to maximise the overall thermal benefit.

This means a far greater thermal performance outcome can be achieved along with making the home cheaper to run by lowering overall heating and cooling loads, ready for BASIX compliance in NSW or 6 star compliance in other states. The process of simulating using BERs Pro gives a more detailed assessment for the client, providing many more options to design with.