An update of the UK’s test reference year: The implications of a revised climate on building design

Copyright © 2015 SAGE PublicationsAverage weather years have been used around the world for testing buildings to ascertain their likely energy use using thermal modelling software. In the UK, the Test Reference Years which are in current use were released in 2006 but generally consisted of data from 1983 to 2004. In this work, revised test reference years will be proposed which are based on a new climatic period from 1984 to 2013. The differences between the two years will be highlighted and the implications for building design will be discussed.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)CIBS

Investigating the overheating risk in refurbished social housing

Global average surface temperatures are predicted to rise from 1 to 5°C by 2100. Also, extreme events such as heat waves are expected to increase in intensity, frequency and duration. In most of Europe and other developed countries, existing buildings are projected to form from 70% to 80% of the built stock by 2050. Investigating the risk of overheating in the existing building stock is therefore crucial in order to adopt measures which can help to mitigate what it can be a lethal effect of global warming: prolonged exposure to high temperatures in buildings. By collecting measured data, this study investigates indoor temperatures and thermal comfort in bedrooms, kitchens and living rooms of 46 newly-retrofitted free-running social houses in Exeter, UK during the summer 2014. The overheating risk was evaluated using the CIBSE TM52 adaptive benchmark. It was seen evidence of 10 out of 86 rooms overheating in 9 dwellings. It was found that kitchens and bedrooms are the rooms with the greater overheating risk among the monitored spaces. It was also found that old and vulnerable occupants are at a higher risk of being exposed to high indoor temperatures due to fact that they spent most of their time indoor and also because of poor indoor ventilation

ROOM – A Web-based Interactive Educational Tool on Building Physics

It is known that one of the causes of the performance gap is a disconnect between the ability of building performance software and those that use it. E-learning tools, if designed properly, could be used to address this by educating or re-educating architects and others about building physics. A review of the literature shows that to be successful, any such tool needs to present a consistent pedagogy, support activity-rich interactions and include a meaningful sensory demonstration. The design of a web-based tool (ROOM), which is being developed for assisting the learning of building physics in environmental design, is then described as an example of how to achieve this. Key to ROOM is that it attempts to provide intuitively the high-level visceral knowledge needed of architects. For example, knowing what a reverberation time of 1.5s sounds like, rather than just being able to calculate a reverberation timeusing a formula; or knowing that increasing the width of a window to improve the average daylight factor is in general less effective than increasing the widow height