I’ve been considering PlusSpec for a while but I’m not sure about how customisable it is for the UK. Firstly if there are any UK users here I would be very interested in hearing from you in terms of how well it works for a typical UK residential design.
Secondly the following list from a thread in the UK section of the forum discusses some UK specific building features which I think sets out a good summary of some of the basic elements required.
“Block and beam ground floors, floor insulation and screeds, UK window and door styles, cavity insulated brick and block walls, external vertical tiling, external wall rendering, flat roofs, dormer windows, loft conversions etc, etc.”
From what I’ve found out so far, elements such as beam and block floors, dormer windows and cavity insulated brick and block walls do not seem to be available as standard. The question is whether these can be customised and then reused as standard on future projects? I can of course draw them in SketchUp but that defeats the purpose in some ways of having PlusSpec. Also if building elements are drawn in SketchUp outside of PlusSpecc can they be itemised and costed in the materials schedule?
On the subject of the materials schedule I notice that it seems to give areas of bricks etc rather than number of bricks. Whilst it is easy enough to calculate brick numbers from a wall area it is a further step and again this can be done in native SketchUp in any case. Can a formula not be applied to output numbers of items?
By the way I notice that there is now a video tutorial on customising brick textures and it used a UK brick size which is positive. As a point of information however the size used was incorrect. A standard UK brick is 215 x 65 x 102.5 and not 112.5 as shown in the video. The source image used was wrong.
Anyway I would of course download a demo to find these questions out for myself but there is no demo available! I realise that I can pay for the software and request a refund after 30 days if it’s not suitable, but I’d rather not do that if I can find out beforehand if it is likely to work for me. As a company purchase there is also a bit of accountancy hassle in doing so. I would strongly encourage you to offer a demo, however I realise that you don’t want to at this time.
PlusSpec has now become almost completely customisable.
You can also add almost anything to your model and use the BIM tool. The BIM tool allows you to draw in SketchUp and then add an itemcode, cost and more so that it can be estimated. This means that you can add any missing layers or anything else and have it estimate correctly.
Dormer windows can be done in the latest version of PlusSpec. Beam and block floors can be created with our latest tools. Cavity insulated brick and block walls are currently the only one we cannot do automatically, you can edit normally and do it manually for now but we are working on being able to create these types of walls.
You are correct, currently we only give areas of bricks and so on. We are in the process of making changes to our take-off but for now you can put the take-off into Excel and create formulas from there.
The video tutorial was using Australian Brick sizes and this is the reason for the error. You can create your UK sizes very simply and efficiently.
Yes very sorry but currently we don’t offer a trial.
Thank you very much for your questions and forum post and I will be here to answer any further questions.
That all sounds good. I’ve finally decided to buy and trial it now when I get a bit of time in the next week or two.I like the fact that you seem to be developing it quickly and adding new features when requested.
If you could bring forward the cavity insulated brick and block walls that would be great. These are very common in the UK. They can be partial or full fill. The following provides some useful UK specific details.
We take all of our customers suggestions on board and try put them into the software and implement them the best we can for every user. We are very interested in becoming more suited for the UK and Europe and we thank you for the information that you have given us.
We have been working on walls that are more suited for the UK.
Once again thank you for your being supportive of us.
Guys we did a lot of work for our UK user base, I would be interested in hearing what you think of the Block and beam tool, It is great for estimating. We could also use some manufacturer input if there any reading. The more products we add the better the experience for everybody.