How Psiclops sources material properties — datasheets, published standards, and AI lookups with visible provenance.
No — deliberately not, and we think that's a real advantage rather than a gap. Building products change constantly: manufacturers reformulate, discontinue, and relaunch, and a curated internal database is only ever as trustworthy as the last time someone remembered to update it — exactly the kind of silent staleness that's dangerous in a figure feeding a compliance calculation. Instead, every material value in Psiclops carries its own explicit, visible provenance, always one of: a genuine manufacturer datasheet you upload directly (see the next question), a published standard default (ISO 10456 or BR 443), a live AI lookup against the manufacturer's own current published data — shown with a confidence rating (high, medium, or low), never presented as more certain than it is — or simply entered by you. That citation is carried straight through to the calculation and the report itself, so an assessor can see exactly where a value came from, rather than trust an unattributed number pulled from a database that might be years out of date. Editing a value later never silently discards this citation — see the next question.
Yes — when adding a material, you can upload the manufacturer's own PDF datasheet directly instead of typing in its name, thermal conductivity (λ), and vapour resistivity (µ) or Sd value by hand. Psiclops reads the document and fills in whichever of those fields it can find automatically, citing the datasheet itself as the material's source ("Manufacturer datasheet — filename.pdf") rather than a generic label. Even if extraction can't find a particular value from the document, the datasheet is still kept as the material's source; you just enter that value yourself. And because the datasheet is a genuine, current source, subsequently editing the extracted λ or µ/Sd value to match what you can see in the document doesn't downgrade its provenance to a generic "user supplied" label — it stays correctly attributed to the datasheet you uploaded, since the real source hasn't changed. λ feeds directly into your U-value, and µ/Sd into the Glaser condensation check — see the U-values & Glaser FAQ for how each is actually used.
Emissivity describes how readily a surface radiates heat, on a scale from 0 to 1. It only ever matters where a material borders an unventilated air cavity: across a cavity, a meaningful share of the heat crosses by radiation rather than conduction, so a reflective surface facing the gap cuts that share substantially and raises the cavity's thermal resistance. It has no effect anywhere else, so for most materials you can leave it alone. BR 497 §2.4 sets the convention Psiclops follows: the emissivity of building materials is taken as high — 0.9 — and it "should be assumed that the emissivity of all materials is high unless there is acceptable independent test evidence to the contrary". A polished metal or foil-faced surface, such as the foil facing on a rigid insulation board, is typically 0.2 or lower. So you only need to enter a value when you are claiming a low-emissivity product and can point to evidence for it; leaving the field blank applies the 0.9 default. Where a datasheet states an emissivity, Psiclops extracts it along with the other properties, with the same visible provenance as thermal conductivity. A material carries a single emissivity figure, and that figure belongs to one face of it — a foil-faced board is reflective on one side and an ordinary surface on the other. Which side cannot be worked out from a drawing or a layer stack, because a board built either way round looks identical, so Psiclops asks. In a 1D assembly a small arrow appears at the boundary between the material and the air its reflective side faces, labelled "reflective side"; clicking it moves the reflective face to the material's other side. It is shown only when that side is against air, because a reflective face against a solid changes nothing. In a 2D drawing the equivalent choice is made in the Reflective surfaces step. Either way, only the air on the side you nominate takes the low value; the opposite face stays at 0.9. Where a product's reflective face isn't against air at all — a foil-faced board bonded to plasterboard, with the cavity on its other side — the simplest answer is to record its emissivity as 0.9, since a reflective surface facing a solid does no radiative work and changes no result. Nothing is lost by doing so: emissivity and vapour resistance are entirely independent, so the board keeps its µ or Sd value and goes on acting as a vapour control layer exactly as before.
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