Sustainable Engineering Ltd has released The Carbonator, a tool its team built for calculating building embodied and operational carbon emissions, so it can be used by all Passive House designers.
Read this article for more technical background.
Here is a recording of the webinar we hosted when the tool was launched.
Here is a copy of the slide deck.
This spreadsheet-based tool was developed to assist with our Initial Design service and it’s been tested in-house for more than a year. It has its limitations (discussed in the webinar) but it fulfils a need to quickly and cheaply gather insight into the embodied and operational carbon implications of different design choices.
It is most useful early in the design stage when different options are being considered. It’s particularly helpful for showing clients the carbon cost of different material decisions. (For those not wanting to do this enquiry themselves, this and other very useful data is produced by Sustainable Engineering’s Initial Design service. You can read more about that here.)
There are of course a number of assumptions built in. The Carbonator follows the latest MBIE Building for Climate Change operational and embodied carbon guidance. It’s also been checked against LCAQuick, which we also use. The Carbonator is much faster and easier to use as it refers to pre-built assemblies. Users can add their own assembly details. It links to the PHPP design file and auto-calculates using inputs already detailed there.