Journal Article


Comparative building performance evaluation of a ‘sustainable’ community centre and a public library building

Abstract

This paper uses a forensic building performance evaluation approach to undertake a comparative evaluation of the in-use energy and environmental performance data (collected over two years) of two civic buildings located in Southeast England – a small community centre (<1000m2) and a medium-sized public library building (~4500m2), which are designed to high sustainability standards (EPC A rating) and low heating demand met by on-site low/zero carbon technologies. Although both buildings achieved measured air-permeability rates of ~5m3/hr.m2, they encountered similar issues related to poor documentation of ‘as-built’ drawings, poor handover and guidance, problems with integrating and maintaining new technologies (heat pumps, biomass boilers and solar thermal), lack of calibration of sub-meters, and issues with automatic window controls. However the actual carbon emissions of the community centre are double the predicted, while they are almost five times in the case of library building. This is because the community centre management team overcame some of the issues through their continuous engagement and interest in the building’s performance, whereas the management team of the Library building failed to engage with energy management, resulting in disuse of the biomass boiler and solar thermal system.

Attached files

Authors

Gupta, R
Kapsali, M
Gregg, M

Oxford Brookes departments

Faculty of Technology, Design and Environment\School of Architecture

Dates

Year of publication: 2017
Date of RADAR deposit: 2017-06-12


Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License


Related resources

This RADAR resource is the Accepted Manuscript of Comparative building performance evaluation of a ‘sustainable’ community centre and a public library building

Details

  • Owner: Daniel Croft (removed)
  • Collection: Outputs
  • Version: 1 (show all)
  • Status: Live
  • Views (since Sept 2022): 406