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Construction management in practice
Published in Fred Sherratt, Peter Farrell, Introduction to Construction Management, 2023
Another area of industry concern in the UK surrounds the existing housing stock. In the UK about two thirds of the homes we will live in by 2050 have already been built, but their efficiency is generally poor. Although new-build houses do contain significant insulation, older housing stock does not. Therefore the retrofitting of insulation and other energy-saving technologies will be needed to improve the energy efficiency of houses and reduce their carbon footprints in the future.
Case Studies
Published in Dorothy Gerring, Renewable Energy Systems for Building Designers, 2023
Design for the 125 Haus began in May 2009 and construction was completed from May to October 2011. It is located in Summit Park, a small neighborhood near Park City, Utah, USA. The detached single-family house, shown in figure 23E.1, has 2,444ft2 (178m2) of conditioned space with 3 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, kitchen and dining, living room (shown in figure 23E.2), play area, and studio, as well as a 2-car garage and exterior decks and patios. The architect was Atelier Jörg Rügemer and the General Contractor was Garbett Homes. Structural engineering was provided by LR Nelsons of Salt Lake City and Las Vegas. The original mechanical engineer was Heliocentric, however, their system did not work satisfactorily and was replaced. The current HVAC system was designed as part of Rügemer’s research and was installed and has successfully run and been tested over the past 6 years. He also did two years of post-occupancy monitoring on all systems.
Unmaking the made: the troubled temporalities of waste
Published in Zsuzsa Gille, Josh Lepawsky, The Routledge Handbook of Waste Studies, 2021
Next to material wear and tear, cultural concepts of obsolescence and society’s expectations of technical progress, newness, and durability define whether, when, and why artefacts are to be considered “aged”, or even “antiquated”, “outdated”, or “obsolete” and how long, on average, they should last in use. The example of houses might illustrate the point: Modern buildings often last only for some decades and next to construction methods and materials, regional and cultural settings have the biggest influence on such durabilities of use; an average house in Japan, for instance, stands for 30 years before it is demolished; in the United States, the average life span of a house is 55 years; in Britain, it’s 77 years (Cairns and Jacobs 2014, 127). Naturally, these diverse life spans come with differing practices of use and maintenance, of repair and breakdown, of renewal and demolition.
Energy conservation assessment of traditional and modern houses in Sydney
Published in Building Research & Information, 2021
Haider Albayyaa, Dharmappa Hagare, Swapan Saha
The heating and cooling of residential houses is a critical issue in Australia. Considering the temperature fluctuations due to climate change, there is a need for energy efficient residential houses in New South Wales (NSW), Australia (Impact of Climate Change, 2017). The residential sector is responsible for 25% of Australia’s total energy consumption (Origin energy, 2017). Accordingly, Australian policies have increasingly focused on energy conservation in residential buildings. In Australia, specifically in NSW, energy efficiency policies comprise a mix of regulatory, disclosure and financial approaches (Torcellini et al., 2006). New South Wales has been identified as having more aggressive energy efficiency policies than any other states in Australia. The introduction of the Building Sustainability Index (BASIX) in NSW has led to improvements in the average building shell efficiency (NSW Department of Planning, 2017). Space heating and cooling loads have increased significantly over the last 10 years and comprise 40% of residential electric energy consumption. This is expected to increase in the coming years owing to the climate change. Thus, there is a huge potential to reduce household energy consumption by improving house designs, ventilation and insulation, which can reduce the heating and cooling energy requirement (Ascione et al., 2010; Bambrook et al., 2011).
How building design and technologies influence heat-related habits
Published in Building Research & Information, 2018
Anders Rhiger Hansen, Kirsten Gram-Hanssen, Henrik N. Knudsen
Through energy-efficiency retrofitting, it is possible to improve energy efficiency, especially for older houses. Therefore, houses built before 1979 have additional survey information on the energy-efficiency improvement of the building envelope (e.g. replacement of windows, insulation of walls and insulation of roof). If two of these three improvements have been done, it is considered an extensive improvement, whereas only one of these is considered a moderate improvement. Table 3 shows the final variable, which indicates the energy efficiency of the building envelope, and to some extent also the architectural design of buildings from different periods.
Comparative assessment of insulated concrete wall technologies and wood-frame walls in residential buildings: a multi-criteria analysis of hygrothermal performance, cost, and environmental footprints
Published in Advances in Building Energy Research, 2021
Farhad Amiri Fard, Ali Jafarpour, Fuzhan Nasiri
In a single-family house, the exterior wall must interact in all aspects (material, load, expansion, contraction, movement, and so on) with the main structure. In fact, constructing concrete walls requires a structure capable of bearing all the dead and live loads while meeting the building code requirements of residential buildings. In this sense, four case study scenarios are considered: (1) WW; wood-frame exterior walls with the main structure made also from wood, (2) WC; wood-frame exterior walls with the main structure made from concrete, (3) ICF; with load bearable exterior walls that act as the main structure, and (4) PICP exterior walls acting as the main structure. The above exterior walls were assumed to be employed in a two-story single-family house with a total living area of 192 square metres. Table 1 illustrates the specification of building envelope components. It is assumed that four occupants live in the building; the heating system is electric baseboard without cooling and mechanical ventilation system as most single-family houses in this region do not have cooling and ventilation. Hence the focus will be on space heating which is associated with a significant share of energy consumption in buildings. The life span of the house is considered as 65 years. Table 2 provides the estimations for building material quantities based on specification, drawing, and ASHRAE, as well as building code recommendations. The identical windows are double glazed with SHGC values equal to 0.52 and an R-value of 1.76 m2.K/W for optimum energy performance in all case study houses (Armstrong, Elmahdy, Swinton, & Parekh, 2008). However, in reality, ICFs and PICP usually have a smaller window than a wood-frame due to structural compliance, but in this paper, the sizes of all windows are considered identical.