NOTE: Okay guys, 1154 views and no answer? Maybe it's because the post is too long, so I'm resuming in few words:
Can you recommend me a MEP software (or separate softwares for each discipline) besides Autodesk products that can perform basic calculations? I don't need fancy stuff though.
Thank you in advance.
----
LONG VERSION:
Me and my brother we are starting our little business, we've been evaluating CAD and BIM programs for weeks and we already decided that ArchiCAD is the best software for us (or me
) in terms of production, cost-benefit and features as it stands at the moment.Our plan is to work with small-to-medium projects, both residential and commercial, a friend is going to take part like a services provider, mostly for civil and structural projecting and analysis. I'm an electrical engineer on papers but I like to design functional buildings, my bro is a 'de facto' MEP engineer. (We're from the old "Turbocad vs AutoCAD" days though
)The problem though is, we would like to have a software that could perform basic calculations for ducts, pipes and cables, conduits and routing are also desired features but not that important. We absolutely refuse to do everything 'manually' nowadays. Plus I don't have much understanding on HVAC systems and I could use a little help to design those (of course my bro is going to review everything carefully according to his other pre-historic softwares and personal knowledge).
It seems Revit can do that, but I would like to stay away from Autodesk. There's also that 'Fine MEP' from 4M which seems quite powerful but I don't know if we can rely on it because the Fine ELEC (We have a trial) although seemingly correct there are lots of typos on the interface, it doesn't feel very 'professional' at all. I could be wrong though.
DDS-CAD is out of question, as well as ACAD plugins.
So, are there any other alternatives? If the MEP modeller had the calculations it would be just perfect for us. We don't want fully automated stuff (although auto-routing would be cool
), just some feedback and calculations, so we can have more data and clues if something's not quite right to change it immediately.Thanks in advance.
PS: I've registered to download the trial of ArchiCAD and when I selected Hungary as my country the site redirected me to pages in hungarian and I don't speak hungarian and couldn't even finish the form correctly (I've entered anything) plus there's apparently no way to change it back to english when logged, I had to use google translate to figure things... Just because I'm hungarian you can't assume I speak that language! There should be at least a way to see the pages in english/other language I speak!
Still looking?
