Drawing a floor plan without SketchUp: from sketch to VEKA volumes

For every EPC file, you calculate from three key figures that follow directly from your floor plan:

• Gross floor area: the area of each level, measured to the outside of the exterior walls, added up across all levels within the protected volume.
• Protected volume: the volume of all spaces that are heated or intended to be, from basement to attic, bounded by the heat-loss surfaces.
• Heat-loss surfaces: every surface through which the protected volume loses heat, such as an exterior wall, a roof plane, a slab-on-grade floor, or a wall facing an unheated garage or storage room.

You don't determine these three figures independently: they all follow from the same floor plan, with the right levels, walls and openings drawn correctly. A mistake in your floor plan, such as a wrongly delimited garage, therefore carries through into all three figures.

The classic workflow has two steps: first you measure on site with a tape measure or laser and note everything on paper or in a sketch app, then you redraw those measurements that evening or the next day in SketchUp. That handover already costs time on its own, but the real problem is that mistakes only become visible while redrawing: a forgotten wall, a swapped measurement, a corner that didn't quite feel square on site. By then you're no longer there to re-measure it.

A second time sink is that SketchUp has no idea what VEKA needs: you have to manually calculate or export areas and volumes yourself, per level, and transfer them separately into the VEKA portal. A floor plan drawn directly on site, with the right levels, eliminates the redrawing step and the risk of mistakes you only notice afterwards.

The wall-by-wall tool in Plattegrond v2 lets you draw each wall by entering a starting point, a direction and a length, while you literally walk through the building. For the length you have two options:

• Bluetooth laser: on laptop and Android, connect a Leica DISTO or Bosch GLM/PLR laser over Bluetooth and every measured distance lands directly in the right field. On iPad, only a Leica DISTO in keyboard mode works for now and types the measurement into the field; Bosch lasers don't work there yet, because Safari on iPad doesn't give web apps Bluetooth access.
• Manual entry: without a laser on hand, measure with a tape measure and type the length in yourself.

Either way, the file shows afterwards which measurement came from the laser and which was entered manually, so if in doubt you immediately know which value to check first.

Few homes have perfectly square corners, and on site you rarely measure to the millimetre. Plattegrond v2 makes sure your drawing does not suffer: almost-square corners are straightened on screen, and an extra measurement on a wall adjusts the rest of the plan, without moving a side you already measured.

The result is a floor plan with realistic proportions, even before everything is measured.

You draw each storey separately, from basement to attic, with its own outer outline, interior walls and ceiling height. Which storeys your file expects follows from the data you entered when creating the file.

This matters because the gross floor area per storey is added up, and a storey with a smaller footprint (for example because of a roof slope or a recessed facade) must never simply take over the area of the storey below.

The most common mistakes when drawing a floor plan are:

• Not correctly delimiting an extension or garage as unprotected volume, which throws off the heat-loss surface calculation.
• Skipping or merging a level, for instance a mezzanine or a partially lowered ceiling, resulting in an incorrect gross floor area.
• Drawing only the outer outline without interior walls, which stops rooms from being correctly delimited for the rest of the file.
• Setting the front facade orientation incorrectly, which affects the sun exposure and heat-loss calculation per facade.

Each of these mistakes is usually invisible on screen: you only notice once the calculated areas or volumes don't match what you saw on site.

If you have an existing building plan from the architect as a PDF, you no longer need to start from scratch. The floor plan from an architect's PDF (beta) feature recognises walls, doors and windows in the uploaded plan and prepares a first floor plan per level.

That pre-drawn plan is a starting point, not a final result: you check it during the survey, correct where recognition goes wrong, and still measure the critical dimensions with the laser or tape measure to be sure the plan matches the as-built situation. An architect's plan shows the design after all, not necessarily what was ultimately built. Because the feature is in beta, this on-site check remains a fixed part of your workflow.

You draw the floor plan on your iPad with the right measurements, levels and ceiling heights per storey. That data is ready in your file right away: the app automatically calculates the gross floor area per level and the total from your drawing.

Automatically deriving the protected volume and heat-loss surfaces from that same drawing, without SketchUp, is still in beta. Until that feature is complete, you check and fill in those two values yourself before entering them into VEKA, for instance based on your own calculation.