International Participant Spotlight: PLANiT Measuring
Are you looking for ways to reduce energy consumption in your properties? Experts recommend starting with an accurate energy audit. An essential part of conducting of an accurate audit is Building Information Modeling or BIM. Not familiar with BIM? Well at this year’s Environmental Trade Mission and Conference TM experts from PLANiT Measuring® will be available to discuss this technology and how it can save you energy using their Whole Building Energy Analysis. PLANiT Measuring® measures existing buildings and creates “as-built” digital floor plans and BIMs for all property types across North America.
PLANiT Measuring® was founded in 1993 to create residential floor plans for real estate agents and homeowners. In order to make an accurate floor plan, Mike Laurie, the company’s founder, had to measure each property using a tape measure and a pad of paper. It was a time consuming, difficult process.
The process became a little easier a few years later with the introduction of hand held laser measuring devices. Distances were recorded by the laser but the information still had to be documented by hand and then entered into AutoCAD. Other methods such as cloud laser scanning became the rage for a while until it was found that the data gathered could not easily be transferred to useful CAD format and using it for interior spaces was impractical at best.
Mr. Laurie, a Professional Engineer, decided that there had to be a better way. So he went to work to develop proprietary software that integrates laser measuring technology with CAD software that is customized for efficient as-built data collection, operating on a laptop computer.
The system is called MeasuringBoardTM and now operates on a Tablet PC. MeasuringBoardTM provides incredible real-time, digital CAD plans of buildings complete with square footage spreadsheets of the space. It is also the key component enabling PLANiT to now create complete 4D digital models of existing buildings (BIM).
PLANiT will walk through and recreate the entire building in a digital 4 dimensional model. No need for digitizing existing plans or using costly and inefficient cloud scanning. This is a breakthrough technology that will cause a fundamental shift in the way existing buildings will be analyzed. The BIM is the platform for collaborative work by all trades, and services that need access to buildings information and until now has been used almost exclusively in the design of new buildings.
The resulting BIM is run through very powerful DOE-2 energy analysis software which produces complete energy studies including carbon output, fuel use, solar potential, wind potential, rain water harvesting potential and allows for multiple energy retrofit simulations.
In 2003, MeasuringBoardTM won the prestigious TCA Innovative Product Technology award. In 2005, the Honourable David L. Emerson, Minister of Industry and the Minister responsible for the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) announced that PLANiT Measuring® had been recognized by the NRC as a Canadian Innovation Leader and a role model for technology based innovation. Minister Emerson stated “We commend PLANiT Measuring® for their ingenuity and inventiveness, which is bringing about the commercialization of new products in the marketplace.”
PLANiT Measuring® would like to meet building portfolio owners during the conference. Recently, PLANiT measured over 900 buildings for one owner across Canada and is prepared to take on jobs of any size across North America having measured over 200 million square feet of space to date.
We are delighted that PLANiT Measuring® has decided to participate in The Environmental Trade Mission and Conference. To learn more about PLANiT, be sure to check out their website at http://www.planitmeasuring.com/.
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