Air conditioning & VRF
VRF systems, validated before they are ordered.
Pair indoor and outdoor units, route the refrigerant pipework, and engiCAD sizes the copper, checks the system against the manufacturer's limits and reports the refrigerant charge — before a purchase order goes anywhere.
Design
Units, pipework and load in one place.
Indoor and outdoor units
Typed objects split by unit class, each drawing from its own catalogue, so an indoor unit is never offered where an outdoor unit belongs.
Refrigerant pipework
Liquid and gas lines routed with discipline defaults and standard copper sizes, connected as a real network.
Branch selectors and controllers
Local and central controllers and branch selectors as placeable families, with three-pipe systems auto-nesting outdoor unit to branch selector to indoor unit.
Cooling loads
Preliminary AC loads per space by level, with design-day heating and cooling loads available through the EnergyPlus engine.
Validation
The checks a manufacturer would run.
Each outdoor unit is assessed against the profile for its brand — the allowed connection band, the piping limits and the copper chart all come from that profile rather than a generic default.
- Copper line sizing — sized against manufacturer sizing charts, held as an editable table library you can extend.
- Connection ratio — indoor-to-outdoor capacity ratio checked against the brand's allowed band, flagging over- and under-coupled systems.
- Piping limits — total run length and indoor-to-outdoor height difference checked against the manufacturer's stated maxima.
- Refrigerant charge — liquid-line volume multiplied by density, reported as a charge and as F-Gas tCO₂e.
- Safety factor — a project-level factor applied to cooling load for copper sizing and unit selection, so margin is explicit.
- Validation dashboard — a per-outdoor-unit verdict rolling connection ratio, piping limits and copper sizing into one column.
What comes out
Schedules that match the system.
AC schedules
Load schedules and indoor/outdoor unit schedules generated from the placed equipment.
Copper pipework schedule
Sized copper runs with the refrigerant charge and F-Gas figure reported alongside.
Isometric view
A 2.5D projection of a refrigerant network for the drawing set.
Quantities
Copper lengths by size and unit counts by type, straight into the take-off.
Related
Where to look next.
See it on your own project.
engiCAD is in active development and we are onboarding a small number of practices. Tell us what you work on and we will arrange a walkthrough against a drawing you recognise.