WINDOW SILL ANCHOR TO BASE OF SKIN WHICH US CUT BY PRIORITY

[Anonymous]

Hello,

just working thru the Priority Based Connections (PBC) in AC17, and how this affects the wall base, and sill heights of doors and windows, and how these schedule.

When the wall base is below the storey level (as in the attached image) we can set the window sill ANCHOR to be SILL TO STORY X, this works fine for us, as the base of the internal skin is at the story level, and this is where we want the sill to be dimensioned from in the schedule.

Because we need the Window Schedule to show sill height from the base of the INTERNAL SKIN of the composite, our issue is when the wall and slab is set down below (or above) the story level, IE in a garage situation where we would have a set down between the main house and garage levels.

In this garage situation we cannot use ANCHOR to be SILL TO STORY X, nor can we use the ANCHOR to SILL TO WALL BASE, as neither of these will give the dimension from the base of the INTERNAL SKIN to the window sill.

Is there any way we can get ArchiCAD to schedule the window sill height from a cut skin/cut wall base point, when that point is NOT at a story level?

[Barry Kelly]

To me this is an example of the existing features (schedules) not keeping up with new features (PBC).
But on the other hand it would be a very tricky one to police.
Imagine your wall continued below the slab - the PBC would cut a notch for the slab but where is the bottom of the wall - the slab or the actual base of the wall well below the slab.

Also what if your wall interacted with slabs at different heights - i.e same one wall with a dropped garage floor and a standard height floor at storey level further along.
How would Archicad know what you are referring to as the base of the sill?

Personally I would still construct it with the wall starting at slab level and a second wall below - the PBC can still do its magic on this wall below if needed.
This also helps when placing doors - make them all "sill to wall base" and you will never have a problem with bit of wall across the threshold.

Barry.

[Anonymous]

Barry you're like my personal guardian angel lately. Answering all of my questions on this forum. Thank you.

You make some very good points about how would ArchiCAD actually do what I'm looking for, especially if the wall continued passed the slab, or if the wall interacted with multiple slabs at different heights.

Maybe they could link the sill height anchor to a particular slab? Or they could incorporate an 'offset' function to the story - altho this could cause issues if the slab to sill dimension ever changed as we could easily forget to update the offset in the window settings.

We discussed some work arounds in the office, one of them being yours - adding in the extra wall below the slab or story level, or adding additional stories for each slab level (probably only the ground floor and garage levels reqd) but we're trying very hard to reduce work arounds.

Looks like ArchiCAD wins this one tho, and we'll need to decide which work around to use.

Thanks again