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Energy Efficient Building Services

Buildings

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Introduction

While energy consumption and atmospheric carbon emissions from most UK building-related services are falling, those associated with air conditioning are growing as more buildings become air-conditioned. Current government guidance states that air conditioning should only be used where necessary, but when air conditioning is required little information on which systems are the most appropriate from an energy efficiency and carbon emissions view is available.

Research undertaken at the Welsh School of Architecture aims to fill this information gap by monitoring the performance of air conditioning and heat-pump systems 'is-use' within actual office buildings throughout the UK, in order to better understand their real world performance.

So far the work has studied 32 systems at sites throughout the UK over a period of 2 years, undertaking energy monitoring, assessment of internal heat gains, modelling of fabric and solar loads and the measurement of chiller part-load performance.

This research provides a unique insight into the actual "real-world" performance of building services in the UK. Future developments of this data are intended to feed into guidance to the building services industry on energy efficiency and underpin revisions to the building regulations at both the UK and EU level.