This may be a simple one that I’m missing, but how do you all handle mechanical louvers on your studies? We’ve done area takeoffs and used the metals section to get a rough estimate, but this seems prone to errors and doesn’t seem like it would cleanly represent the louver manufacturing. I’d love to hear how others have handled tracking this.
Hi Justin -
Unfortunately I don’t have a clean solution, but I would like to reinforce your question. Our current standard practice is to omit mechanical louvers from WBLCA studies in Tally, on the assumption that they are relatively insignificant by mass.
Hi Alex,
Thank you for the input. Sounds like your firm’s standard practice makes a lot of sense.
This peaked my interest as a specifier - since we often “own” the louvers based on engineer performance requirements. Our usual go-to’s are nearly 100% extruded aluminum by content - so I’m curious if anyone else has seen impacts for these products. At least one brand (Ruskin) lists a shipping weight of 4-6 lbs/sf of louver area (for a 4" depth)…which theoretically could be modelled as a PVDF finished aluminum mass?
Reviving this thread… Just made a happy discovery – in the latest release of Tally, there is a material entry for aluminum louvers called “vertical window unit framing”.
a year and a half later, we finally have our answer! thank you!