Floor plans of the house - disto vs total station

My own house, I used a TS.?ÿ When being paid disto or pocket tape.

It all depends....

What the purpose is, how old the building is, ....

With old buildings where the walls aren't plumb and the building isn't square then a Disto alone is going to mean many trips back to sort out the discrepancies, If the building is a reasonable size and nice rectangular rooms a Disto is good enough. Anything more complicated then some total station work is a good investmant. It might just be an external shape (to give a framework for the disto) or you might just drop a few internal stations in and pick up a corner or two in most rooms to give the Disto fixed points to tie from. Where there are any corridors with several rooms going off then a quick traverse along those picking up a point on each door frame and a shot into any rooms where you can see will only take a few minutes and pays off hansomely when you come to try and get the Disto readings to match up.

Tape measures and disto.

Why use a surveyor? This is carpentry work.?ÿ

What little of this type of work I've done, I find very frustrating with the tools I had to work with.?ÿ

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Good job for a scanner. Here is an example using 16 scans @ 90 seconds per scan. About 15 minutes of post-processing.

@leegreen?ÿ

Scanning is fine if the operator is doing it all the time. The problems start when one is hired and the operator doesn't look behind the furniture/fittings because "it's automatic, it does everything for me!" Surprising how oftern scan surveys have missed out on box-outs, both in corners and at low level (even one which had the stair headroom box-out protruding into a room, which was missed).

Or Total station or scanning.?ÿ

Never a disto.

I donƒ??t do interior work. But for measuring up the exterior of a building, a disto and tape work for me. As previously suggested, I shoot as many corners as I can with the TS and use the disto and tape for the tough ones. I overlap a couple of TS distances with the disto as a check.?ÿ

For large buildings - TS traverse around and through.?ÿ Disto to do the small areas, and rooms.

For complicated smaller buildings, TS around the outside, locate corners, door jams, and window openings, then Disto the interior and fit it between the TS measurements.

Smaller buildings, Disto the inside, locate doors and windows to help fit the rooms together.

Bring and use a laptop and draft real time while doing the interior, a little longer while your are there but will prevent return trips.?ÿ I bring a notebook measure a couple of rooms, maybe a whole floor, and sit and draft it right away.?ÿ You will catch issues, out of square rooms, and angles pretty quick.?ÿ On older buildings watch your interior wall thicknesses, I have seen 2x4, 6, 8 and 2ft thick walls all in the same old building.

One tip I forgot to mention earlier. If you stick a reflective target on a window in each/most rooms (facing outwards, for those who haven't thought it through) you can tie your room dimensions to these with the Disto and pick them up from the external Total Station survey. That way each room which is Disto-ed is also anchored to the external footprint. (and it gives you a height check for all those floors which aren't quite as level as they ought to be.)

In the late 1980s I did a room-by-room architectural survey of the Sheraton Palace -- an 8 (?) story hotel in downtown San Francisco -- in preparation for a major remodel.?ÿ We used a 100-foot steel tape to station the doorframes along the corridors, and a regular pocket tape to measure up the rooms.?ÿ The building exterior was surveyed by another crew, and their measurements were used to anchor our inside work.?ÿ?ÿI don't remember how long it took, but it seems like it was a couple of weeks.?ÿ

The hotel provided us with a room, which made the stay convenient.?ÿ They also provided us with a master key that gave access to all the rooms.?ÿ The desk staff were instructed not to rent any rooms on the floor we were working on, but a couple of times there was a hiccup, and a few guests were surprised to awaken to us barging into their room in the morning.

2 questions:

1. What is the stated precision required in the contract??ÿ If not stated, what are the plans to be used for?

2. Barring that, what is the budget?

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Hopefully, #2 was set based upon input for #1.

Posted by: @bushaxe

I donƒ??t do interior work.?ÿ

If I know how, have the tools and the time, I pretty much do any work. Variety is the spice of life!

Now with scanners, it makes these kinds of floor plans so easy and quick to do up.?ÿ

Before scanners for large buildings, we would use Total Station to do the exterior and also the skeletons frame in the interior. Then will use Disto to fill up the smaller walls and missing areas. This helps to reduce the blunders due to disto but also quicken up the speed.?ÿ

these are surveys that are really too hard to define as to scope of services. we have done them but, no more. they are not going to like my pricing. time intensive from field side and putting these together. redundancy of measurements without something raising its ugly head down the road.

I have been doing these for over 20 years. This is the method I find works best for me if 2D floor plans are the deliverable.

1. Measure footprint of building outside with total station
2. Traverse through hallways or any large rooms, picking up as many building corner intersections of smaller rooms from hallways as I can and floor levels by door.
3. Use Disto S910 (great for this type of work as it is like a mini total station) on its compact tripod to get footprint of remaining rooms.
4. Download and tie all the footprint together back in the office and at this stage I import into MBS Measured Building Survey software (there are other types as well)
5. Return to site with tablet and add Ceiling heights, beams, windows, doors etc. with disto straight into MBS on the tablet
6. Output drawing to Cad for final cleanup.

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If a 3D output/Revit model is required the building gets laser scanned. If detailed elevations are required they get scanned. From my experience trying to extract 2D plans from laser scan is incredibly tedious and time consuming. The ts and disto s910 are faster.