Understanding Active Floors

At Ediphi, we are constantly striving to address inefficiencies in construction. Active Floors is one method we employ within our application to tackle this issue, enabling users to pinpoint the specific floors where a Use Group is Active (in use). Put simply, it provides a means to determine “On how many floors does this particular Use Group operate?”

The Active Floor feature can be utilized in quantity formulas as a value (similar to Geometry Worksheets and Attributes).

How it works

• Whenever a non-zero value is entered in the Area Sheet for a floor under a specific Use Group, the platform automatically toggles on the Active Floor under that Use Group.

• Any time a value is changed to zero (0), the platform automatically toggles off the Active Floor under that Use Group.

Making Sense of Active Floors

To better visualize how powerful the Active Floors feature can be, let’s imagine we have a building with some floors allotted to a Hotel, and others allotted to Apartments. You set these as separate Use Groups under your estimate.

Now, let's say you want an Ice Maker room in every floor of the Hotel. Selecting the Active Floors that apply to the Hotel Use Group would allow you to add this to a formula under your Room schedule that automatically tracks every time you add/remove a floor for your Hotel (or alter the square footage of said floors).

For the Apartment floors, you don't actually need an Ice Maker room in every floor. The Active Floor feature allows you to specify under which Use Group each floor falls under, so that when the calculations are made in formulas, the platform is counting all the Hotel floors and not counting the Apartment floors (or even counting the building as a whole).

Let’s look at another example.

Say you want to add a bus duct line item to your estimate, and you want to assign its cost to the Apartment Use Group. By using a quantity formula and selecting the Active Floor value, you can select the specific Use Group and Column (like Floor Count, Floor Area, Floor to Floor, Floor Perimeter, and Gross Facade) so that the platform can automatically calculate the quantity needed of bus ducts, and this quantity will vary based on what you selects as the Active Floors for the Apartment Use Group.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact our support team and we'll be happy to help!