Equipment Library

Selecting the "Equipment Library" menu item from the "Tools" menu opens the "Custom Equipment Library" dialog.

The "Custom Equipment Library" dialog provides the user with the opportunity to customize and maintain a list of previously defined equipment performance characteristics that can be re-used in many assemblies across multiple projects.

The database provides a default list of equipment types, along with their operating characteristics (fuel use, production rates etc.).  You can modify these settings if you feel the defalts are not indicative of your equipment or operating conditions, and save your changes on your hard disk, for future use.  

Note: You can only save one customized equipment table, however, you can make individual adjustments in each project file.

The fuel consumption values are calculated from the production rates (typically in terms of a daily volume or mass of material worked), hours per day, minutes per hour that the equipment is actually used and load factors, multiplied by average fuel usage for the average horsepower for each piece of equipment.  These values may vary greatly from project to project, city to city, or equipment to equipment.  You can therefore define any of the factors yourself, thereby calculating a new fuel consumption figure, and overriding the default.  If you know your specific fuel consumption values, you can define them yourself and bypass the calculations just described and overide the default values.  The fuel consumption units are defined in the database and cannot be edited, you must convert any values that you may use yourself to the same units as in the table. The values in the "default" column reflect the value of each editable factor when the the project form is loaded or after the user cilck on one of the "Load" buttons.

Some equipment uses supplementary fuels in their operation (e.g. propane heaters in a paving recycler), you can define this fuel consumption in the table.

Once you have defined the fuel consumption table, you can save it as your custom equipment library, to be used in any project.

Note: If a fuel consumption rate is manually entered, it will be overwritten if the user enters a new value for any of the other editable factors.