The CarbonCounter project aligns with the Design & Decision Tools for Low Impact Buildings competition criteria in the following ways:
• CarbonCounter’s primary purpose is to provide immediate and appropriate feedback at the conceptual design stage, to guide and inform design decisions related to the delivery of low carbon sustainable buildings to known building performance standards, including those associated with the 2016 'zero carbon' objectives;
• By feeding accurate performance and costing information from CPM's into the conceptual design process, and providing immediate overall design feedback, CarbonCounter will dramatically improve the quality of information that is available at early stages of the design process on projected whole building performance and costs and the impacts arising from the choice of specific combinations of products, technologies and construction methods. In this way it will enable sensitivity analyses to be undertaken of variations in building geometry, orientation, products, methods etc, and avoid costly mistakes being made due to lack of information at the initial design stage;
• CarbonCounter is intended to be an affordable software design tool, with back-up support available, to enable widespread take-up in the industry, particularly amongst SME's and micro-enterprises;
• CarbonCounter aims to:
a) reduce the costs of designing low carbon sustainable buildings;
b) enable designers to rapidly perceive ways of affordably improving the carbon performance of buildings, beyond a level that they might ordinarily pursue;
c) upskill designers by enabling them to learn from the feedback the tool provides, and interrogate the tool on the rationale behind its feedback, and;
d) enable designers to avoid costly errors at the initial design stage, both in terms of financial costs and carbon / sustainability performance;
• CarbonCounter will be developed in a modular format to easily facilitate the addition of new modules to cater for evolving regulations and sustainability standards, as well as opportunities for expansion into awakening overseas markets, contributing to UK export sales.