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The performance of Grange Primary School in Newham is being monitored
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Greenwatt Way is a POE project
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During the heady days of the emerging UK Green Building Council back in 2006, there was much talk of the need for radical change in the way the industry design, build and operate buildings. Lots of effort has gone into the supply chain of new materials, the building of prototype low-energy housing and debate about the definition of zero carbon.
Important as these relatively high profile activities are, it is not enough. One of the most important messages was the campaign for real data, which is obviously not as visual and might therefore be considered a bit geeky by many architects. However, it is just as important to understand how the buildings we have designed and actually built perform, if we are to really understand energy efficiency. Both for existing buildings as well as post-construction newbuild.
So, in collaboration with Dr. Rajat Gupta of Oxford Brookes and his MA course, as well as the help of the many clients who had to arrange access to the dwellings, PRP was able to revisit a cross section of projects the practice had designed� - some recently finished and some much older.
Occupant impact
It quickly became apparent that post-occupancy evaluation (POE) is about much more than just measuring energy use. Technically, POE studies of buildings involve systematic collection and evaluation of information about the performance of a building-in-use over the course of one year, comparing this to design targets and industry benchmarks for the age and type of building. Yet we know that the performance is intricately linked to way a building is used by occupants. The POE study we embarked on evaluated the energy performance of a building and related it to occupant satisfaction thus providing an insight into behavioural issues and any lessons which emerge.
To broaden the scope, the study included a school, a health centre and rental housing of various types and ages. It is much more difficult to access freehold dwellings but to this end we are undertaking an internal voluntary survey of staff energy use at home to try and build our own picture of real energy use in the home. All this data helps to inform our retrofit team who have developed energy efficiency solutions for the prevalent house types.
As the drive for energy efficiency and low or zero carbon technologies has become more established, ever more products, building systems and renewable energy solutions are coming to market. They all carry performance data sheets and predict outputs, but do we know how well they really work? To this end, our collaboration with Scottish and Southern Energy, AECOM and Bramall Construction to design, engineer and build a small cluster of Code for Sustainable Homes level six properties will be especially interesting.
It is all about monitoring of differing low and zero carbon technologies to establish whether they really do what it says on the tin, and to what extent behaviour patterns in energy use may change with the incorporation of these technologies in our low energy housing of the future. This project is now fully occupied and undergoing a two-year monitoring programme run by Reading University and the BRE. As well as the technical data, this project is collecting valuable knowledge about residents perception of super insulated, air tight houses, living with controlled ventilation, and having renewable energy on tap.
National database
All well and good for PRP\'s research team, but the campaign for real data is also about disseminating this information and making it readily available. It\'s no good if we go on doing these \'good works\' on a small scale in isolation, surely we need a national database. In researching the zero carbon compendium, I was impressed with the data for the Minergie Standard in Switzerland, which is equivalent to our BREEAM and Code for Sustainable Homes. I was easily able to find thousands of reference projects with their rating and a link to project details - both newbuild and retrofit. An impressive catalogue which is mapping the take up of exemplary standards as they move towards mainstream adoption.
Rating tools are a good framework for setting goals, but POE is about reaching the targets.� Compulsory DECs (Display Energy Certificates) for all government buildings over 1000sqm is a good start, and we have an emerging data base in the form of CarbonBuzz hosted by CIBSE and RIBA. This is an online bank of measured building performance against design targets, and contributors can upload their project details anonymously or publish them if they so choose - both are valuable in gathering real data, and we could then track if we are moving towards low carbon at a snail\'s pace or with that \'step change\' that the industry is so fond of referring to.
Chris Wilford is associate director at PRP Architects
Further information
Chris Wilford will be talking on what we can learn from POE at Greenbuild Expo on 30th June at 12pm.
For further information on the Swiss Minergie visit minergie.ch/list-of-buildings.html and for the CarbonBuzz database visit www.carbonbuzz.org.
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