One year ago, at the Salon de l’Immobilier Bas Carbone 2022<\/i> (Low Carbon Real Estate Fair), we released ecale.io<\/b>, our tool for assessing the carbon footprint of building envelopes. Now, ecale is evolving towards greater precision with new features.<\/p>\n
Ecale was born from a conviction held by Arcora’s teams: our sector’s energy transition will not happen without the fa\u00e7ade. While every trade package has an impact on the climate, the building envelope is responsible for a significant share (15 to 20% for tertiary building construction*), while having decisive importance in the building’s energy efficiency and user comfort. Based on this observation, our teams initially wished to develop an internal tool to evaluate our projects and evolve our practices. We then decided to release an online version, ecale.io, for use by all construction stakeholders.<\/p>\n
The fruit of several years of work within the Lab, our R&D unit, and incubated by IN\u00b3, the Ing\u00e9rop Group’s intrapreneurship program, ecale allows users to describe a fa\u00e7ade grid component by component (glazing, opaque infills, joinery, solar shading, etc.) in a simple and playful way, and to visualize its impact on global warming in real-time over 50 years. The tool synthesizes the multitude of data regarding the fa\u00e7ade package, thanks to a database regularly fed with information from the INIES database, supplemented by European databases.<\/p>\n
After one year of use, dozens of projects evaluated, and a hundred reports issued, ecale is benefiting from an update on the occasion of the Sibca 2023<\/i> fair. Consequently, its database has been enriched, notably with a wider panel of Timber Frame Fa\u00e7ades (FOB)<\/b>, new glazing options, and the possibility of introducing reused components<\/b>. This evolution responds to a desire to improve the ecale tool and to offer an increasingly complete aid for decarbonized design.<\/p>\n