Impact Estimator Known Issues

The current release of the Athena Impact Estimator for Buildings is 5.4.01 (Version 5.4 Build 0103). It was released in February 2020.

This page contains last-minute product information and will be regularly updated to reflect the most up–to–date state of the known issues with the Athena Impact Estimator for Buildings Version 5.

Known Issues

  1. Custom Walls - Double Counting On Site Construction Energy Consumption for Walls that are Lifted By Crane For Custom Walls, we are using Crane to lift the total mass for all Child Walls, Envelope Materials, Doors and Windows. If a child wall is also lifted by crane, then its crane-related energy consumption is being double counted. The following walls are affected by this bug:
    • Insulated Concrete Form Wall
    • Curtain Wall
    • Cross Laminated Timber Wall
  2. LCA Results due to Project level and Assembly Group level Extra Basic Material (EBM) are different despite material data and project data being identical. For Extra Materials we approximate A4 (On Site Construction Process) energy consumption by using a crane to lift material half the building height. This is being done for Project level EBM data, but not for Assembly Group level EBM data.
  3. Export LCA Results to Excel unable to locate exported file. The file is initially exported to %AppData%\Athena Institute\Impact Estimator for Buildings\Sandbox to workaround synchronization issues (e.g., Dropbox, OneDrive, GoogleDrive, ...) then it is copied to the the folder where the project was last saved (or loaded from), which is it's intended destination. This behaviour is intentional. The bug lies in the fact that the App tries to open the Excel file from the Sandbox instead of the final (intended) destination. Additionally, if a new (or duplicated) project has not been saved, the app is not able to resolve an intended destination and attempts to save it to the folder where a the most recently saved project was saved or should fall through to the user Documented folder.
  4. All Forms - Forms do not accept numeric entries if the decimal symbol is a comma. (e.g., French Language numeric values). This will occur in the "Add Project" form, where the user may enter data into any of the input boxes, but will not be able to click the "OK" button to accept the new project.  If the Regional and Language settings in the Windows Control Panel are set to a language such as French (Canada), where the decimal symbol is set as a comma, as opposed to a period, the forms in Impact Estimator will not validate properly, and an error will occur.
    Workaround:
    To work around this, open Regional and Language Options in the Control Panel, and either switch the format to English, or Customize the French format so that the decimal symbol is a period.  After making the change, re-open Impact Estimator and proceed.  Don't forget to switch the period back to a comma when you are finished working in the Impact Estimator.
  5. Columns & Beams Assembly Validation Error when the form loads : When no User Defined Concrete Mixes have been defined, a validation error occurs when the Columns & Beams assembly form is loaded.
    Workaround:

    1. Launch the Impact Estimator.
    2. Click on the Tools menu item.
    3. Click on the User Defined Concrete Mix Design Library sub-menu item.
    4. Proceed to add a dummy record to the User Defined Concrete Mix Design Library.
  6. Material - Polyester felt : The manufacturing data for "Polyester felt" needs to be updated.
  7. Save as Text is missing some of the assembly data. This feature was disabled in version 4.0 Build 66.
  8. Report - Per Unit Area Graphs : For the Per Unit Area Graphs the displayed Area unit of measure (e.g., per m2 or per ft2) is not dependent on the Units for the projects being compared, since this could be a mix of SI and Imperial. Rather, the displayed units basis is determined by the "Default Units" selected in the "Tools -> Options" dialog.
  9. Virtual or Lab Runtime Environments : When the Impact Estimator for Buildings is installed in a lab (client-server) or virtual desktop session runtime environments, some of the user specific files do not successfully install in each user specific folder when the application runs for the first time. The offending files are only successfully installed in the user folder for the account under which the application was installed.
    Workaround:
    The workaround for this is to download the ZIP file from here and decompress it in the user specific folder (e.g., C:\Users\YouUserAccount.YourDomain\Documents\Athena\Impact Estimator for Buildings\). Once the ZIP file has been downloaded, you can choose to use Group Policy Objects or a copy script to accomplish wide distribution of these files.
 
 
 
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