… using the “Advanced Materials Comparison”-function
What are this feature’s benefits?
- Allows investigating the GWP emissions of various materials at one glance
- Creates downloadable bar charts for comparing materials’ emissions
- Can also report financial cost and social cost of carbon
Who can use this function?
This feature is available on Designer and Expert licenses (see overview of features here). If you are interested in upgrading your license, please contact your Account Manager, the LCA Expert you have been in contact with or our Customer Success Team (support@oneclicklca.com).
How to use this feature?
There are 2 ways to start comparing materials:
1. Via the “Compare Data” button
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We can find this green button either on the project start page (1) or on the top right of the building materials query (2).
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If you click on this button, a new browser window pops up, that prompts you to click on “Edit data”, because you have not added any data to the compare function yet.
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This opens a page that resembles the building materials query. Here you can input the materials with their respective quantities that you want to compare. On top, we have the same filters, and there is a search field to find materials you want to compare. If you add a material resource, you see similar columns as well. If a life-cycle-costing (LCC) tool is enabled on your license, you also have the option to edit the cost data of this data point. Be sure to adjust the LCC parameters, as those will affect the results.
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Once you are happy with your inputs you can click “Compare Data” to see the graphs mentioned above. Please note that only materials within the same material type or classification can be compared to each other,- the box you see at the top of the Compare Data results page allows you to select the desired material type/classification.
2. Via the "Adding to compare” option
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This approach enables you to add several materials to the comparison that you want to conduct at once rather than one by one. If you search for a material and click on the check-box left next to it, you can see that the text “Add to compare” becomes green and clickable. In brackets, you see how many materials were selected.
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If you click on “Add to compare” it grays out again, and the number in brackets is now shown next to the "Compare Data” button on the top right (or added to the total there).
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If you click the “Compare Data” button, the results will appear in a separate window. You can also click to edit data from there, which will take you to the same page that was mentioned above.
Last but not least
- Comparing constructions is currently not enabled with this feature. To do this, we recommend creating designs for each of the groups and comparing them via the comparative graphs on the project start page.
- Here is some further guidance on this function: Advanced Materials Comparison.