Hero – Home Energy Rating and Optimisation is a next generation energy modelling tool used to optimise building designs and show NatHERS Energy-Rating compliance for residential buildings within Australia.
Hero is a NatHERS Accredited Software providing the modelling capabilities and accuracy required to meet the NatHERS Software Accreditation Protocol.
Used to model Class 1a Single Residential buildings as well as Class 2 Apartment projects, Hero is for both new and existing renovation projects.
Hero is a Windows desktop application (with Mac coming soon) installed on a user’s computer to perform energy-ratings, with the Hero Web-portal performing NatHERS certification functions.
Hero Software was founded to provide the NatHERS and sustainable building industry the tools to quickly and accurately model and optimise buildings. We want to help energy-raters spend more time advising their clients on energy-efficient design options and less time on data-entry.
With professional experience in the industry, Hero has been designed from the ground up to deliver the necessary features to make performing NatHERS Assessments painless, efficient and cost-effective.
Our core development objectives have been ease, speed, automation & power.
We’ve got big plans for future developments of Hero, from optimisation, automation and cost-benefit analysis tools, to as-built verifications and CAD integrations.
As energy-raters, we’re passionate about engaging and supporting the community to create a better building industry.
As an ESD Engineer and Energy-Rater with over 10 years experience, Nick Bishop founded Hero Software to help deliver better tools for energy-raters; to allow the industry to deliver the quality of work that we all want to produce and to help drive the Australian construction industry towards a low-carbon future.
Forming his first ESD Consultancy company in 2011 in Melbourne, Nick worked across all typologies of the building industry from commercial to public to residential. His focus was on cost-benefit optimisation and in-depth, detailed service; from cost-effective volume-builds to high performance projects such as Passivhaus & Net-Zero Emission homes.
A career highlight was acting as the ESD Consultant on the multi-award winning, 8-star+ Nightingale 1 Project in Brunswick, Victoria as well as several subsequent projects within the Nightingale Housing Model. Here, Nick was critical in the delivery of one of Australia’s first net-zero-emission, all-electric multi-residential projects, with a holistic approach to all aspects of energy-efficiency and sustainable design throughout the project.
Throughout his consulting and energy-modelling work, Nick started developing scripts and tools to automate those processes and enable him to deliver in-depth, efficient outcomes for his clients. Many of those ideas laid the groundwork for Hero & it’s capabilities.
Hero has complete multi-dwelling modelling capabilities allowing start to end modelling and simulation of multiple dwellings within the one Hero project file, be they houses, townhouses or apartments. This allows simple and quick entry and editing of geometry, construction and properties of all walls, floors, windows and other objects across the whole project. With multi-core parallel simulations allowing rapid speeds, and multi-dwelling capabilities extending into the Hero web-portal, performing large multi-dwelling assessments using Hero is revolutionary.
Hero has been designed to allow all the information you need on the one screen. The flexible multi-view capabilities allow resizing, quick toggling of views and customisation to eliminate constantly flicking between screens.
Hero’s geometry adjacency-detection and splitting capabilities mean that all walls, floors and ceilings are automatically split and connected to their adjacent objects across the levels of your project. No more adjacency error messages and manual polygon splitting to connect your floors, Hero does this all for you.
Nearly everything within Hero can be viewed directly from the Visual View, from Downlights, Ceiling Fans to Floating Walls. No more hunting across data-tables for a particular window on a clerestory wall, you’ll see it directly where it is.
Energy-modelling can be data-heavy and presenting this data within large and complex models can be difficult. To this end Hero has powerful organisational features that allow flexible and quick ways of organising your data by its location, zone or dwelling, and we carry this powerful organisational methodology through to our window and construction libraries.
As the developers of Hero, we want you to be able to use our software in the most optimal way and be taught by those who know how to use it best. Hero offers a comprehensive training course through our Learning Platform that takes you through everything you’ll need to undertake NatHERS assessments using Hero.
For existing Accredited NatHERS Assessors, completing the Hero-101 training course will also be recognised by your AAO as undertaking sufficient training for Accreditation in more than one tool.
Designed for novices and power-users alike, Hero is quick and easy to use with most features accessible through keyboard and mouse shortcuts that will accelerate your modelling process.
Certify your projects quickly and securely using the multiple payment options available on the web-portal including credit card, Paypal or direct debit agreements enabling one-click payment.
Hero’s wing-wall generator scans your model as you create it and will automatically create wing-walls based on adjacent walls and screens, minimising manual entry time and improving model accuracy.
Hero has been designed to present the most common information that modellers need to access while still providing the optional depth and complexity of simulation that is occasionally required. From soffit insulation; to an extensive external colour library; to roofspace shapes, Hero has the power to accurately model and analyse complex situations.
Hero’s Alert view provides automatic alert detection of common errors and problems within your model so that you can identify and resolve issues easily. We also use Alerts to check that you are modelling correctly as well as to suggest any possible amendments or incorrect data-entry issues.
Importing backgrounds quickly and accurately is easier than ever, with millimetre perfect import facilities to make sure you’re modelling the true geometry of your building.
Get help and read our Knowledge Base at the Hero support desk. Our trained service team are ready to rapidly and effectively help you solve any issues you have while using Hero.
Hero has been designed to make NatHERS modelling more understandable, reduce lingo and clarify special conditions. Many of these relate to the way Chenath performs models and the guidelines for NatHERS assessments. We’re trying to simplify this process to make it intuitive, understandable and eliminate these special conditions by making the best decisions to match NatHERS modelling requirements.
We are energy-raters. We know the challenges, annoyances and frustrations of performing assessments and we are focused on making your job easier, quicker and more satisfying.
We are an industry-community focused organisation dedicated to you, our clients and we understand the context of what you are working on.
These are just some of the features we’ve integrated into Hero for our beta release, but this is just the beginning. We’ve got big plans for the future, so please visit our Features roadmap for more details of the exciting things to come. We are keen to hear any suggestions you may have or your own great ideas.
The National House Energy Rating Scheme (NatHERS) is an Australian Government program that aims to measure and improve the energy-efficiency of residential buildings within Australia.
The scheme uses energy-modelling software tools to quantify the passive design efficiency of a home via its simulated heating and cooling energy requirements, and then grade the performance on a scale from 0 to 10 stars.
The star-rating as well as the heating and cooling energy is then used to produce a NatHERS Certificate which is used to show compliance with the energy efficiency building regulations required within each state and jurisdiction.
For further information on the NatHERS scheme please visit the NatHERS Website, or see the NatHERS Section of our Resources page for further useful links.
Hero is an Energy Modelling tool and to accomplish this an underlying energy calculation engine is used. The licensed calculation engine in Hero, as for all NatHERS Accredited Software packages is CSIRO’s Chenath engine. The model that Hero creates is sent to the Chenath engine for calculation and the results are processed and presented within the Hero interface.
For more information on Chenath and CSIRO’s energy-modelling research see our Resources page
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