News
MAXIMISING HVAC BOQ ACCURACY BY
CUSTOMISING SOFTWARE CAPABILITY
By Benjamin Brits
One of the major headaches of the contracting industry - the bill of quantity ( BoQ ) condundrum now has a real solution .
With some of the past published articles in mind , including one of the RACA Journal contractors corner columns addressing the challenges around BoQs , a solution has been derived by mastery of Revit MEP – the building information modelling software .
ODA Design & Drafting , as the leading pioneer of this solution , was formed in May 1997 and is based in Centurion , South Africa . Dusan Stefanov , the company ’ s founder and managing director , is a registered Professional Engineer with the Engineering Council of South Africa , a Green Building SA accredited professional , and SAIRAC member .
Dusan and his team have spent a significant amount of time customising this software with relevance to the South African HVACR sectors to a great degree of accuracy . This has also been tested at several chilled water and VRV / VRF projects that the
A chilled water plantroom for a manufacturing facility where the BoQ reporting was used .
company has designed and implemented their Revit solutions at .
“ In a way , the Covid pandemic afforded us the opportunity to spend a lot of time developing this solution - nearly a year period in fact – rather than just sitting around ”, Dusan says jokingly . “ Our development in this aspect can now provide a bill of quantity in a list form , based on various system types and on every element of the design including pipe / duct sizes and lengths , valves , supports , clamps , and so on . This is actually a vital step for this industry as its roll out can create a work environment and relationships where disagreements are pretty much eliminated . We have been able to achieve such good results by our own trial and error .”
As part of this Revit MEP / BoQ solution , attributes can be applied to each component landing on site and installed . This process will also create red flags for high quantity items that could go missing on site , even given that sometimes certain work needs to be fixed or redone too .
An example of a complete design using a VRV / VRF system .
All images by ODA Design & Drafting
Some examples of the family samples that have been customised .
www . hvacronline . co . za RACA Journal I May 2022 7