Energy certificate

What this page is for

Open it with the Energy certificate button in the top navigation. This is a separate workflow from making a 3D model: you upload only the elevation drawings, and the areas are read straight off the facades. There are no storeys, no floor plans and no IFC file at the end of it.

What you get back are the figures an energy certificate starts its calculation from — the E-luvun laskennan lähtötiedot of a Finnish certificate:

• Exterior wall area, without the openings cut into it.
• Exterior window and door areas, with how many of each were drawn.
• Window area by orientation, split across all eight compass directions.
• Window-to-facade ratio, as a percentage of the facade outlines.

The workflow

1. Add the elevations. The left-hand panel has one slot per facade — up to eight: North, East, South and West, plus the four diagonals. Only fill in the facades you actually have a drawing for. A file named something like south.png or Facade Northeast.jpg lands in the matching slot on its own; otherwise drop it on the slot you want. Every row is named for the side it measures, so a drawing that landed in the wrong slot is corrected by dragging it onto the row it belongs to — the two rows exchange their drawings, and every drawing keeps the scale that was set in its own Scale tab. PNG, JPG and PDF are accepted, a ZIP is unpacked into the drawings inside it and webp is refused although the file picker offers it, while the compass rose shows which sides are filled. A PDF is turned into a picture in your browser as it is added, so the 20 MB limit is a limit on that picture rather than on the PDF it came from.
2. Crop and rotate each drawing. Before generating, opening a drawing shows it on a preparation screen where you can draw a crop region around just the facade, Auto Crop the empty margins away, and rotate it upright. Any drawing can be straightened by a fraction of a degree in the Rotation field, because a PDF is turned into a picture as it is added — one with several pages asks which page to use. Do this first — the areas are measured on what is left after cropping.
3. Generate the drawings. Click Generate energy certificate. Only the facade recognition runs, so what appears is an editable vector drawing of each elevation rather than a model.
4. Set the scale. This step is not optional: nothing is measured in square metres until you give each drawing a scale. See Setting the scale is not optional below.
5. Review and correct each facade. Trace the facade outline with the Building tool and mark the windows and doors where they really are. The areas in the right-hand panel follow what you draw, so correcting a missed window changes the result immediately.
6. Unlock the certificate and download it. The numbers stay hidden until you unlock this certificate — see Unlocking and downloading below.

Setting the scale is not optional

Floor plans can usually be scaled on their own, from a scale bar, from the vector data in a PDF, or from the width of the doors. None of that is reliable on an elevation, so this page never guesses — it waits for you. Open the Scale tab of a drawing and calibrate it with either method:

• Line — draw along a dimension line on the elevation and enter its real length.
• Area — draw a rectangle over a surface whose area you know and enter that area.

Each facade is scaled one at a time, in its own Scale tab, even when all the drawings were made at the same scale. Check the result afterwards by measuring something whose length you know. For the details of both methods, see Uploading & scaling drawings and Editor tools & shortcuts.

A drawing you leave unscaled is left out of the totals entirely rather than added as raw pixels, and the results panel tells you how many drawings were measured and names the facades that were not. That way one forgotten scale shows up as a warning instead of quietly making the areas too small.

Eight facades instead of four

This page offers slots for all eight compass directions, including North East, South East, South West and North West, because a certificate wants the window area of every side of the building. The diagonals are only used here: the 3D model still reads the four cardinal elevations alone, and the model page offers only those four slots. Adding a diagonal elevation to a certificate therefore changes the certificate, not a model. How elevations are used when you generate a model is covered in Floors & elevations.

What the results do not include

An elevation only shows what is visible from outside, so part of the certificate table reads Not calculated rather than showing a zero:

Those four rows are not a gap in your drawings — an elevation simply cannot show a roof, a base slab, a joint or a floor area. This page leaves them for you to fill in from the rest of the project information.

Unlocking and downloading

The tables appear in the results panel as soon as any drawing carries a scale, but every computed number stays hidden as dots until you unlock this certificate. You can keep editing the drawings before and after unlocking. Unlocking is the same step as unlocking a model for download, described in Pricing & billing.

Once unlocked, Download Excel builds a workbook with the area table and the window areas by orientation. It refuses to run while no drawing carries a scale, for the same reason the results panel does. Generating the drawings again starts a new certificate, which is locked again until you unlock it.

Related pages

• Uploading & scaling drawings — accepted formats, uploading elevations, and the scaling methods in detail.
• Editor tools & shortcuts — everything the 2D editor can do when you correct a facade.
• Floors & elevations — how elevations feed a 3D model instead of a certificate.
• Pricing & billing — what unlocking costs.