Hi everyone,
I’m currently working on a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for a building project to comply with both LEED and BCZ certification requirements. I’m using Tally directly within Revit, which has been really helpful for integrating LCA with the BIM model. However, I’ve encountered a common challenge: some specific construction materials I’m using in this project are not available in Tally’s material database.
Fortunately, I do have the Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for those materials, and I’d like to incorporate that data into my LCA to ensure accurate results. I know that we can’t add our on EPD on the Tally database but it’s possible to export Tally results to Excel, which I’ve tried—but I find the exported file quite limited:
- The material quantities are in kg,
- There are no embedded formulas,
- And overall, the structure isn’t very analysis-friendly, making manual corrections tedious and time-consuming.
My questions and reflexions are:
- How did you incorporate external EPD data into your LCA?
- Do you correct or supplement the Tally report manually in Excel, or do you use another tool in parallel to handle missing materials?
- Would you recommend using another LCA software (e.g., One Click LCA, eTool, etc.) for this kind of hybrid approach?
- Finally, when a material is missing, do you ever select a semi-equivalent material in Tally and simply note that it’s not an exact match, considering it part of the study’s uncertainties? If so, should you simply attach the EPDs and not calculate them?
Any tips, workflows, or templates would be hugely appreciated. I’m looking for an efficient and reliable way to maintain compliance and transparency in the results without having to rebuild the entire analysis outside of Tally.
Thanks in advance!