Curtain Wall Mockup Cost Calculator

It is Total Mockup Cost divided by a fixed, assumed 5,000 m² production curtain wall area -- not a per-project calculation. At this calculator's defaults, Total Mockup Cost comes to roughly $165,540, so Cost Per m² (Production) reports about $33/m² -- a figure that would only be meaningful as-is for a project that actually has 5,000 m² of curtain wall. Halve the real project to 2,500 m² and the true mockup burden per square metre roughly doubles to about $66/m², even though this calculator's output field would still read the same $33/m² -- treat it as a rough industry-typical ballpark (the 1-3% mockup-to-total-package ratio it's built to approximate), not a number to plug directly into a smaller or larger project's budget without rescaling it yourself.

Both. System Complexity raises the per-square-metre Fabrication Cost rate at every level (standard stick-built to unitized to complex), and separately adds a 30% premium to Lab Fee Per Test once complexity reaches level 3 ("complex," e.g. double-skin or kinetic facades) -- so a more complex system costs more on the fabrication side and the testing side at the same time, never trading one off against the other.

No, they're independent. Mockup Area (set by Mockup Bays, Mockup Stories, Bay Width, and Floor Height) never moves Total Lab Fees or Supervision Cost, and Number of Test Protocols never moves Mockup Area. A bigger specimen costs more to fabricate, ship, and chamber-test regardless of how many protocols you run on it; more protocols cost more in lab fees and on-site supervision regardless of how large that specimen is.

Substantial, and it's not just lab fees. Dropping from this calculator's default 5 test protocols to a single protocol (holding a 2-bay/2-story, standard-complexity mockup fixed) cuts Total Lab Fees from $60,000 to $12,000 -- but Supervision Cost also falls, from $13,200 to $8,400, because on-site supervision time (3 days baseline plus 0.5 days per protocol) shrinks along with the test count. Combined, that's roughly a $52,800 swing, about a third of the total mockup cost at the higher protocol count -- fabrication, engineering, shipping, and chamber costs don't move at all, since those come entirely from Mockup Area and System Complexity, not from how many tests get run on the finished specimen.

Substantially -- fabrication, shipping, and chamber costs all scale with Mockup Area, so a 1-bay/1-story mockup and a 6-bay/4-story mockup can differ by roughly 4x in Total Mockup Cost at this calculator's other defaults, even before accounting for the engineering-hours term, which also scales with area on top of a fixed base.