Image Source: Australian Government

The National Construction Code (NCC) is Australia’s primary set of technical design and construction provisions for buildings. As a performance-based code, it sets the minimum required level for the safety, health, amenity, accessibility and sustainability of certain buildings. It primarily applies to the design and construction of new buildings, and plumbing and drainage systems in new and existing buildings. We use the Local Government Areas (LGA) for each climate zone.

Building classifications below provides information for all users about the grouping of buildings as they are referred to in the NCC.

Covetool automatically select the energy code 'National Construction Code (NCC) 2019' when project is located in Australia (The user has the ability to manually switch to a different code).

The building geometry can be entered manually into cove.tool or exported using different plugins (link to the plugins app store). Read more to learn about manual mode vs 3D mode to get geometry into cove.tool and perform different types of analysis.

The default envelope values in cove.tool are referenced from 'Part J1 Building Fabric' of NCC volume 1 which contains the requirements for multi-residential, commercial, industrial and public buildings and structures.

Here's an example of an Office (large office prototype based on Pacific Northwest National Laboratory commercial prototypes) building's automated envelope inputs in cove.tool:

The ventilation rates calculation performed by cove.tool using standard AS 1668.2 is explained in this article. The sources for automated engineering inputs (deemed-to-satisfy) by cove.tool for NCC 2019 are listed below in the table:

The bench-marking baseline energy data is obtained by comparing Australian climate zone to the equivalent ASHRAE climate zone.

The utility rates can be customized to match the project and the project cost will show up in Australian Dollars (AU$).