Field trialling of a pulse airtightness tester in a range of UK homes

A new low pressure ‘quasi-steady’ pulse technique for determining the airtightness of buildings has been developed further and compared with the standard blower-door technique for field-testing a range of typical UK homes. The reported low pressure air pulse unit (APU) has gone through several development stages related to optimizing the algorithm, pressure reference and system construction. The technique, which is compact, portable and easy to use, has been tested alongside the standard blower-door technique to measure the airtightness of a range of typical UK home types. Representative of the UK housing stock, the homes mostly have low levels of airtightness, resulting in poor energy performance, poor indoor air quality and poor thermal comfort. Some of these homes have been targeted for retrofitting and a quick, low cost and simple method for accurately determining their airtightness has clear advantages for correctly predicting the benefits of any improvements. A comparison between the results given by the two techniques is presented and the field trials indicate that the latest version of the pulse technique is reliable for determining building leakage at low pressure. Repeatability of multiple APU tests in the same house is found to be within +/-5% of the mean. A test where the leakage is increased by a known amount shows the APU is able to measure the change more accurately than the blower-door test. The APU also gives convenience in practical applications, due to being more compact and portable, plus it doesn’t need to penetrate the building envelope. The field trials demonstrate the pulse test has the potential to be a feasible alternative to the standard blower-door test

Education, occupational class, and unemployment in the regions of the United Kingdom

Students in many countries face increased costs of education in the form of direct payments and future tax liabilities and, as a consequence, their education decisions have taken on a greater financial dimension. This has refocused attention on obtaining meaningful estimates of the return to education. Routinely these returns are estimated as the additional earnings derived by an individual following their acquisition of an additional one year of education. However, the use of earnings data in this context is not without methodological problems including likely attenuation and ability bias in measuring the earnings/education relationship, issues concerning the appropriate rate of discount to apply to observed earnings gains and the appropriateness of using years-of-education as the measure of educational attainment. In this paper we explore the use of an alternative means of assessing returns to education by examining shifts in the likelihood of gaining 'labour market success' from various levels of educational qualification within the framework of an ordered logit model. This method offers three distinct advantages: it favours the use of data from the Sample of anonymised records of the 2001 Census for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which, in turn, allows the joint consideration of most of the control variables thought to influence returns to education; it focuses upon the prime source of pecuniary returns to education (labour market success); and it gives expression to the 'screening device' and the 'credentials' aspects of education by focusing upon the importance of qualifications gained rather than the number of years spent in education.education, occupational class, unemployment,