Material choices narrowed by climate and exposure, with the reasoning shown.
Costing and commercial control. 5 questions answered below, each with the arithmetic behind it and the limits of what the tool decides. Open the Climate Material Advisor tool.
Choosing a material is a set of trade offs: exposure, maintenance, availability, cost and how it behaves over time. This advisor takes the conditions you describe, such as climate, position, use and maintenance appetite, and returns materials that suit them with the reasoning stated rather than a recommendation without a basis. It is guidance, not engineering. The advice follows from the conditions entered, and those conditions are incomplete by nature: nobody enters the substrate, the detail and the workmanship, and those decide most failures. What the advisor is good at is narrowing a list before specification, and naming the reason each option is on it. That naming is what makes the guidance useful: a shortlist without reasons is a menu, and a menu is what a specifier already has.
A coastal wall exposed to salt and driving rain, with a low maintenance expectation, returns materials for the exposure and the maintenance position, flags timber that would need regular recoating, and names the property that makes each suggestion suitable. What it does not do is design the wall, the fixing or the detail, because those decide whether the material performs, and they are a specification exercise rather than a selection one.
It takes the conditions you describe and returns materials that suit them, with the reasoning stated for each and the unsuitable ones flagged. It is a narrowing tool: it reduces a specification choice to a shortlist with reasons, which is where a specifier's time is best spent. A shortlist of three with reasons can be argued with, priced and specified; a catalogue of forty cannot. It does not produce a design, a fixing detail or a price.
On the conditions you enter: climate, exposure, position in the building, use of the space and the maintenance the owner is prepared to accept. Each of those changes the answer, and changing one on the page changes the shortlist, which is the quickest way to see whether a recommendation actually rests on the condition you think it does.
No. It names materials and their suitability. Pricing comes from the market price book or from figures you enter, and a material that suits a condition may be unavailable or uneconomic locally. Keeping suitability and cost apart is deliberate, because a shortlist that has already been filtered by price hides the options that would have been right. Price it afterwards, when the list is short enough to price properly.
No. It is guidance on selection. Engineering advice involves loads, movement, fixings, substrate and the specific detail, and it carries responsibility that a selection tool cannot. Use the advisor to narrow a list and an engineer or a specifier to design with it. The two are complements, and the handover between them is much cheaper than a redesign after a failure.
It flags availability as a separate consideration rather than modelling it, because local stock, lead times and merchant coverage change weekly and by location. Where availability decides a specification, the answer comes from a merchant rather than from a page, and the advisor says so instead of presenting a material that cannot be bought.