x6 unique identifiers for each door or window while generating schedule- some musings

[JiAngelo]

I've attached a plan where I've played around with the window and door schedules. For each unit I specified the label "%automatic_label%:[%room.name%]". Notice the doors are either 3068:[] or 3068:[Family] or 3068:[Hall] and the windows are either 3048DH:[] or 3048DH:[Family] or 3048DH:[Hall]

If you Select and Grab the ones with [] for their room name and slide them up/down on the walls. You'll notice they change to include the room name at some points and then contain no room name at other points along the walls. This is because the "Exterior" room (the grey perimeter box that appears when you click just outside of a plan) has no formal %room.name% in Chief.

Looking at my interior wall and you will see Chief can't make up its mind which room a unit belongs in. It chooses [Family] for the lower part of the wall and [Hall] for the upper part. Tech support has been notified and is looking into this. You can slide these units up and down to watch them change their names, too.

Beyond fixing this glitch, I'm thinking if the DBX for these units included a selector for which room we would like them to belong to, then our schedules for these units could be organized/separated/ or easily identified by their room name. If the selector simply defaulted to interior rooms versus exterior, then all units would have an associated %room.name%

It would save a lot of time hunting/matching window/door codes if the code was allowed to include the room name. For instance, a schedule that says W01 - 3012FX[Dining] Quantity 3 immediately tells us there's 3 transoms in the dining room without looking on the plan to see where W01 is (which for transoms generally means its hidden by the label for the window underneath it.)

Let me know your thoughts.

[Glenn Woodward]

You need to close the plan before zipping.

[JiAngelo]

Thanks. I've updated it.

[jtcapa]

The short answer to this is yes. All you need to do is make sure that some part of the data displayed in the schedule is unique. One way to do this is to display the label in the schedule and make sure the label is unique for each object.

This is not really very automatic though. Chief was designed to always group objects because the original programmers were told that this was how people wanted to do it. So this brings up some questions...

Why don't you want to group the objects?

Are there other people here that also don't want to group the objects?

Also, just as an FYI, we are currently looking at ways we can make it much easier to control the schedule ordering in X6. The grouping or not grouping question wasn't something we were really looking at so I need to figure out how important this is to people.

Great. One good reason to not group items had to do with the Energy Code Calculation we have to do in Washington. It would be nice to have each door and window unique as it U-Values may vary depending on its location (unheated garages don't need high u-value windows) So it would be great to distinguish heated spaces from unheated for doors and windows. It would also be great if the scripting program had a way to both pull out the square footages of the heated windows and their associated U-values. Same goes for doors and skylights!!!

I am curious, with all the options in the dxb for doors and windows, why there is not an options to put in U-Values? I suppose, I could add it to the custom label tab, but that is not the best place for it. Any idea if that is possible or in the works?

[kenoeightspot]

JT,

I agree with you.
Nice to see someone else from Washington state.
Did you hear about the Skagit bridge collapse.

[billemery]

Hi JT,
This is already possible to do more or less automatically.

You can already add columns for U-value, and solar gain, or whatever you want to the schedule.

You can give a window components for solar gain, and U-value, or whatever else you want in the component DBX then save it to the library. It will retain its component values, and report those values to the schedule, no matter what you do; as long as you don't make it your default window.

You can change the component values as the situation dictates.

The only downside is, for example; if I have a column labeled wall thickness, and I have a window with a component value of 6" it will not update automatically when I place it in a 4" wall.

If the solar gain coefficient is different on the west side of the house, I can group select those windows and make a change in their values in one step.

Many users don't know the power that we already have with schedules because it is so poorly documented, and the whole component system is user hostile.

[jtcapa]

Thanks Bill,

I will look at the more closely as well as Mr. Trolls video. Great Stuff! Don't even have to use scripting, except to pull out square footage totals.

[jtcapa]

Hi JT,
This is already possible to do more or less automatically.

You can already add columns for U-value, and solar gain, or whatever you want to the schedule.

You can give a window components for solar gain, and U-value, or whatever else you want in the component DBX then save it to the library. It will retain its component values, and report those values to the schedule, no matter what you do; as long as you don't make it your default window.

I cannot follow you Bill. Where in the Window DBX can you add anything like the U-value to a window?? I'm missing something basic. I've looked and looked but simply cannot find a spot to add u-values that will report to the schedule. Please elaborate.

I'm pretty sure it is in the "label" tab of the dbx, that is were all those %automatic_label%:[%room.name%] thing's are, so I can "specify" U-0.32 in that tab, but it shows in the schedule under "labels", you implied you can add columns to the schedule? How? Where?

Also, I may have read this someplace, but does someone have a Ruby script that will report the square footage of the windows in the schedule?

[JiAngelo]

Not the window DBX.
Select the object, Open the component's DBX (one of the icons along the bottom of your screen) then click "Edit Sub Categories"
Add the subcategories "U-value", close out,
then go to your schedules and you will find "U-value" can be selected as displayed.

What I can't figure out is how to get the value I put in the DBX under U-value to show up in the schedule.

[billemery]

Here I'm adding a subcategory.

[billemery]

Here I'm typing in a u value, adding a column to the schedule, and adding the window to my library.

[perryh]

Thanks Bill I am running into that right now with building depts.

[jtcapa]

Thanks for the graphic description Bill. I hate to admit this but I've never, ever used that "component" tab!! How cool. Adding a sub-cat, was easy following your description, and copying and pasting the window is a great way to get that in the schedule... So many new cool tools. I cannot tell you how many times I've printed out the default schedule and then by hand added up all the windows square footage and u-values to put in our WSEC work sheet. I time consuming process. THANKS!!!

[perryh]

I just wish the new u value info ( in the box) would stick to the sched. for each new window without having to copy from an already fixed window. I don't think you can enter the u value info for all windows at once

[dshall]

I just wish the new u value info ( in the box) would stick to the sched. for each new window without having to copy from an already fixed window. I don't think you can enter the u value info for all windows at once

Yep, that would be my issue. Until our bldg dept. requires it, (and if they did I would just use a general note at bottom of schedule), I ain't dealing with it. Maybe in X6 this will be an option. I would like to think they are working on improving the schedules.