BREEAM – What’s your opinion?

February 15, 2012 by 2 Comments

BSRIA recently held an event as part of our Building Environmental Assessment Network to discuss opinions on BREEAM.  This is always a hot topic with lots of views, and this event was no different.

For those new to the world of environmental assessment, BREEAM (the BRE Environmental Assessment Method) is a criteria based assessment of the sustainability of a building.  Developed by the BRE in 1990, it is now the UK’s most used environmental assessment method, and is often a requirement of planning.  More details can be found at www.breeam.org.

The aim of the event was to see if the 2011 changes were sitting well with the industry or needed changing.  It was also a chance to give BRE feedback directly for future changes, or problems that have been encountered.

Particular issues raised were:

  • The transparency of some of the calculation methods
  • Getting feedback or answers to queries from BRE
  • Issues with the energy credits in the 2011 version, especially when dealing with CHP units. 
  • Some refrigeration related credits appear impossible to get

Questions raised in the presentations were:

  • Is the value of each credit appropriate?
  • Is the industry ready for all the changes made in 2011?
  • Is the qualification route for assessors and BREEAM APs appropriate?
  • Is there need for more information for the industry?

The presentations given on the day are available from: http://www.bsria.co.uk/services/membership/networks/building-assessment-network/

So do you have an opinion on BREEAM?  What works well and what needs some adjustment?  Of particular interest would be your experience of the latest version of BREEAM, i.e. 2011.

Filed under Assessment, BREEAM, Campaign, Construction, Energy, Environment, Performance, Sustainability Tagged with ,

The most important BIM survey yet

January 31, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Hi all and Happy NewYear!

You’ll be pleased to know that both CIBSE and BSRIA work together for the better of BIM, and that members of CIBSE’s BIM group cross reference with, and in some cases appear on BSRIA’s BIM group also. Who says BIM doesn’t improve collaboration?!! The BSRIA and CIBSE groups are careful not to duplicate effort – CIBSE’s group is concentrating on defining the information parameters to be embedded or attached to building services BIM objects at different levels of development, while the BSRIA group is concentrating on setting out the characteristics of BIM models at different project stages and developing exemplar illustrations of what different stages of a BIM model should look like. Both of these initiatives will provide valuable assistance to the building services sector, including design consultants, contractors, specialists and equipment manufacturers.

You will hopefully have seen in January’s CIBSE Journal, an excellent article by Tim Dwyer on the state of the nation of BIM in Building Services terms. If you haven’t already I recommend you take a look.

As part of that article, probably the most important Building Services BIM survey yet has been launched and I urge you all to complete the survey yourselves and pass it onto your colleagues.

The results of this survey will directly affect how CIBSE (and others) look at BIM from your point of view, and will help to shape the plans in the coming years, so it’s essential that the Building Services community take this seriously and as many as possible take part. In particular the survey will help identify the most popular mechanisms for improving the skills and capability of our sector, as well as gauge the level of expertise already achieved.

You can take the survey here: http://goo.gl/W5lb8 and it should take less than five minutes. One thing, some corporate IT networks will not allow you to access this – so try it from home if you have trouble.

Finally, both CIBSE and BSRIA are participating in the BIMForum that has been established by the Construction Industry Council to bring together points of view from across the construction sector, including contractors and facilities managers. The current focus of this Forum is the definition of an industry-wide set of data exchange points that will formalise the BIM relationship between client and supply chain, and which is very closely linked to the ongoing development of BSRIA’s Design Framework document (BG6/2009).

 

 

 

 

 

Gary Ross (Capita Symonds)

David Churcher (BSRIA)

 

Filed under BIM, Building services, Construction, Contractors, Design, Survey Tagged with ,

Room temperature measurement

January 12, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Measuring temperature in a room is one of the things we do most often as building services engineers.  It seems straightforward, but is it really as simple as it appears?

Specifications often state that a certain temperature must be maintained in a building, but what does this mean? Designers need to know what they are designing for. Contractors need to know where to put the sensors. Commissioning engineers need to know how to confirm the building meets the specification and last, but not least the occupants need to be satisfied and comfortable.

I would like to know what you think and what you do for temperature measurement….

  • Do you measure air temperature, radiant temperature, environmental temperature or something else?
  • What height do you measure it?
  • Where in the room? At desks or in the centre?
  • At the worst spot, the best spot or the average?
  • How long do you measure for?
  • Should you take the average over time, the lowest or the highest?
  • How long should you leave the system to warm up or cool down?
  • What do you use to measure temperature; liquid in glass bulb, thermistor, thermocouple or infrared?
  • How is your thermometer or temperature sensor calibrated and how often?
  • Should we really be specifying temperature at all?  It is often occupant comfort that matters most.

This might lead to a Best Practice Guide or a series of guides because we could also look at other measurements for building services such as water temperature, humidity and air flow. You can feedback using the form below or by commenting on this post.

Filed under Construction, Energy, Occupant Satisfaction, Performance, Sustainability Tagged with , , , , , ,

Post Occupancy Evaluation – The challenges of a ‘greener’ future

December 9, 2011 by 1 Comment

I joined BSRIA as a Graduate Engineer in January 2011. Prior to this I was studying for my PhD in the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Leeds.

An Appraisal of the performance of a ‘green’ office building

A summary of my research is given below:

The challenges of a ‘greener’ future are now a responsibility for everyone. This is particularly so for the built environment, where sustainable building design is no longer an innovative option but more of a legislative must. Unfortunately significant differences are often found between the design and measured performance of buildings, with many factors contributing towards these discrepancies.

The research work investigated, using Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE) techniques, the credibility gap between design and measured performance of a partially occupied ‘green’ office building selected as the case study. The results found that the measured energy consumption was over three times the design estimates, and the performance compared poorly against good practice benchmarks for similar buildings. The study’s POE also revealed inefficient control settings, high out-of-hours energy consumption and ineffective building management.

This study went beyond a typical POE as it also includes investigations into how the occupancy variations, and the management strategies applied under these conditions, can impact on building energy performance through the use of simulation modelling techniques (IES<VE>). This is an area where very little research had previously been carried out. At the 50% occupancy levels found at the time the research was conducted, potential annual savings of over £30,000 in utility bills and 60% in energy consumption were estimated if more effective management and control was implemented.

Social-related aspects of building performance are also investigated. Occupant satisfaction and comfort surveys were conducted and the results were compared to previous findings. The perceived comfort and satisfaction with temperature was the most disappointing finding from the survey, however overall the building was comparable to the average benchmarks, but did not perform well when compared to other ‘green’ office buildings.

The study revealed the potential for the building to be fine-tuned to perform more efficiently than was at the time of the study, however there must be suitable, skilled Facility Management to ensure this is delivered.

For more information on Post Occupancy Evaluation/ Building Performance Evaluation…..

Filed under BPE, Building Performance Evaluation, Energy, Occupant Satisfaction, Performance, POE, Post Occupancy Evaluation Tagged with , , ,

Are Compact Fluorescent Lamps welcome in your home?

November 2, 2011 by 2 Comments

Fluorescent lamp technology is certainly not new and when linear lamps became available after the Second World War their advantages were rapidly recognised by both industry and commerce so that by the 1970s fluorescent lighting had become a standard method of interior lighting for most buildings.

It therefore seemed reasonable that Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFLs) introduced in the 1980s would be equally well accepted in the home by domestic consumers. However home users were not immediately impressed by the long-term savings, and were deterred by the high initial costs. Indifferent or poor colour rendering, physical incompatibility, mercury hazards, unfulfilled marketing claims and slow warm up were perceived as disadvantages.

 The arguments for and against CFLs became polarised and European governments decided to tip the scales by “banning” domestic filament lamps. Retailers meanwhile adopted “loss leader” pricing of CFLs and the popular national press reacted with health scares from mercury and ultraviolet radiation. The consequence was consumer confusion. However the argument has shifted with rising energy costs having a significant impact on domestic budgets and technological progress has addressed to some extent the earlier quality issues.

 There is now the opportunity to make a more rational judgement. Most information has been biased one way or the other. However there is now an independent and thorough assessment of CFLs that factually examines many of the issues and is well worth reading:

“An examination into the use of CFLs in the domestic environment”. James Thomas Duff (2011) has been published in the new CIBSE SDAR Journal for September. 

 No single lamp type can solve all lighting problems. The choice should be determined by the particular activities and thus the lighting needs of the occupants, rather than the architecture or design of the dwelling. Many building services operate in part to preserve the fabric and environment whereas lighting is only required when the space is occupied. As soon as it is vacated the lighting can, and should be switched off. Lighting is for the people, and the home is where personal character prevails. The choice is yours but hopefully it can now be based on sound facts rather than scare-mongering or “prohibition”.

Filed under Cost efficiency, Customer Satisfaction, Electricity, Energy, Lighting, Performance, Technology Tagged with ,

Are you ready for the Government strategy on BIM?

October 18, 2011 by 1 Comment

There has been much comment, speculation and debate recently about the Government BIM strategy and all that it implies and demands. I was at the launch in London and just looking at the crowd who turned up and reading some of the name badges you could tell that on the surface at least, we as UK Plc are beginning to take this thing called Building Information Modelling (BIM) seriously.

My question therefore is not about paying BIM lip service, but are we actually ready as a nation to grab hold of this new process and way of working and make best use of it?

In the past we have come up with some revolutionary ideas, inventions etc, and have all but given them away, or allowed other countries to become world leaders in lets face it, “our” technology.
BIM may not be ours, but that does not stop us being the best in the world at it. Look West and you will see the US has a two year jump start over the rest of us. Look East and you will see nations such as Germany, Russia and China already gaining pace and I do not think they will hand the baton to us if we just ask nicely.
 

So are we really ready? Are you really ready? Not your nation, your company – you?
Answers on a postcard please….

Filed under BIM, Government, Strategy, Technology Tagged with

Integrated working – is it the right time again?

September 7, 2011 by Leave a Comment

For those of us who remember back to the early 1990s, the current drive of the Government’s construction strategy to get better value from construction by reforming procurement may seem like a case of history repeating itself (see The Latham Report “Constructing the Team”, 1994).

What is interesting to note is that both reports followed severe recessions in the construction sector which had themselves followed relatively long periods of growth in construction output. Of course this might be no more than coincidence, or it may be an attempt to embed some much-needed structural changes at a time when the industry is experiencing a buyer’s market, so that when times improve there is less tendency for the industry to revert to type.

I welcome the kinds of change that are now mooted: involving suppliers at the time they can add value to a project, which generally means earlier than usual; clients focusing on specifying output performance and designers/contractors working together to develop integrated solutions; supply chains engaged on serial orders that will encourage research and innovation.

We need more fundamental changes

I believe, however, that this will need a wider set of more fundamental changes to be put in place than just exhorting traditionally separate disciplines to work together. There are a number of hidden drivers that I suspect will also have to be tackled for this change to be effective.

These include the fragmentary nature of the client, the underlying power of the finance and insurance industries, and the tendency to think short-term.

A fragmented client comes from devolution of budgets, which itself promotes budgetary responsibility, but which also means that more organisations become occasional clients and don’t have the chance to develop the skills to deal with a sophisticated and confusing industry.

Finance and insurance underpin many of the choices made by developers and designers in terms of the technical standards they build into their schemes – no landlord wants to be left holding a difficult-to-let office block because the permitted floor loadings are outside the norm, irrespective of whether this capacity is ever needed. Manufacturers may feel the need to offer warranties to give their customers a safety net – difficult to achieve when a technology is new and may be favoured from an energy efficiency point of view.

Short term thinking is natural, but is often the enemy of good decision-making. It drives lower capital expenditure at the expense of higher operational costs. This may come from governments not seeing beyond the next election, or officials not seeing beyond their current posting, or organisations behaving as though they were not going to be around for more than a few years. Which is all understandable, but not really defensible. We have tools to help make good, long-term decisions – such as life-cycle costing – all we need to do is not be afraid to use them.

Integrated working for all supporting stakeholders

In my view, the desire for more integrated working must not be restricted to the primary members of the construction industry, but must also extend to all the supporting stakeholders and really engage with the operators and maintainers of buildings and infrastructure – a distinction which is unnecessarily perpetuated by the separation of CAPEX and OPEX budgets inside client organisations.

So, is it the right time for integrated working?

Filed under Construction, Cost efficiency, Performance, Recession Tagged with

Taking lighting to task

September 1, 2011 by Leave a Comment

For many years the conventional method of interior lighting for workplaces was by ‘general illumination’. As lighting was not expensive to purchase, install or operate, the principle was to provide illumination over the whole floor area with a high degree of uniformity. This enabled plants or furniture to be subsequently positioned anywhere in the space and easily moved without recourse to changing the lighting array.

Council House 2 - Offices. Spot the five sources of light....

 However for the past decade UK lighting codes and standards have recommended not ‘general’ but ‘task’ lighting. The significance of this change has either been ignored or gone largely un-noticed as the illumination values were basically the same. The new concept recognised that the main critical visual task is only carried out over a small part of the total floor area. The rest of the space is used for circulation, storage, filing and similar activities all of which are less demanding in terms of illumination. Lighting the whole area to the highest illumination required can use about a third more energy than matching the illumination to the different activities.

Energy costs are continuing to rise and therefore providing the right amount of light only where it is needed is beneficial both economically and environmentally. Also variation in illumination can make the space visually more interesting than overall uniformity. Normally the reason for still providing ‘general’ illumination is because the building is a speculative development and there is no client to determine the furniture layout, or simply that the layout has not been decided yet. I think potential tenants need to be aware that for lighting to be visually efficient the equipment should be electrically efficient and the lighting design should suit the activities across the space. Providing light where and when it is not needed is inefficient regardless of lumens per watt performance of the luminaires.  

Recommended illumination levels in the past were based upon the need to determine detail in the visual task, together with the amount of contrast critical nature of the work and the importance of colour discrimination. Recently there have been massive changes to how we read the written word with print on paper largely being replaced by self-illuminated screens of computers, tablets, telephones, information signs, cash registers, etc. At the same time there has been the move towards ‘hot desking’. No longer does a space have a constant lighting need. The visual task performed at any point will depend upon the occupant at any one time. Does this mean we should revert to general illumination?

Or does the lighting of our buildings require a fundamental rethink so it is more appropriate to today’s sometimes conflicting needs of energy conservation, use of electronic media devices and flexible occupancy of spaces?   Modern lamps have long lives and therefore lighting is only infrequently changed. Installations over twenty years old are not uncommon, a time span when most other electrical equipment will have been replaced several times. 

Filed under Building Regs, Cost efficiency, Energy, Lighting, Sustainability Tagged with

BIM – are we really the trailing edge?

July 5, 2011 by 7 Comments

Hello and welcome to my series of BIM posts. BSRIA have kindly invited me as a guest author, and I’d very much like to hear your views.

But first…an introduction. I am Gary Ross and I’m an Associate Director at Capita Symonds, working in their Building Services section. I cover five offices, driving BIM and smart working across them, as well as linking in with my multi-discipline counterparts across our business.  Most recently I worked for Autodesk, the developers of Revit MEP, and it is here that my passion now lies.

Are we really that far behind? Image Courtesy of Capita Symonds

‘Tail end Charlies’

I’ll go into what Revit means to Capita in a later post, but first I’d like to challenge the view that the Building Services industry are seen by many as the trailing edge of the construction industry – the “tail end Charlies” if you will. With any new technology we seem to be the last to pick it up, the least successful and the slowest to respond to change.

Why are building services behind the times?

Perhaps we don’t promote ourselves as an industry very well? A quick search of the new government Building Information Modelling (BIM) Working Party Strategy Paper reveals just one mention of the term ‘building services’.  Or is it that we really are behind the times generally? Is it just that the technology for Building Services actually lags behind the tools that our counterparts can use months or years earlier?

Do you think it’s a fair representation?

Is it just a case of disciplines bashing disciplines or is it a fair cop? If people say we are behind, are they over egging it for some reason or are they normally being reasonable?

How do you think we can go about improving our image?

Is it just a case of shouting louder? Do we have to radically change our ways or are there just a few tweaks needed?

Filed under BIM Tagged with ,

Measuring happiness: what do your customers value?

June 10, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Competitive tender is the norm in our building and construction world. Awarding a contract to the lowest price bidder may seem to be both the easiest and fairest way. However, there are adverse side effects to this practice. The most obvious issue is that the whole industry becomes far too cost-focused. Everybody is trying to be more productive whilst delivering the job at the lowest cost, and as a result they are sometimes cutting corners without considering the long-term impact of this attitude, including on their customers.

Customer satisfaction is widely known as being crucial to a company’s success, and can impact the following areas within a company:

  • Driving market share
  • Customer retention ratings
  • Stock price
  • Process improvement

Customer satisfaction surveys can provide a useful wake-up call if you are not really satisfying your customers, and also provide a good way forward for process improvement. Surveys can establish areas for development in a company and help you to stay ahead of the competition (techniques include the Likert scale, and tools like the ACSI, below).

Competitive Advantage

Recent research studies show an important relationship between customer satisfaction and economic performance (Fornell et al., 2006). Firms that receive positive customer feedback are likely to improve the level and stability of their net cash flows, and even benefit from high return with low risk.

Customer satisfaction, as measured by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), can be correlated to the market value of equity. It has therefore been suggested that securities research needs pay closer attention to customer satisfaction and the strength of customer relationships. From a corporate CEO perspective, it is clear that the cost of managing customer relationships and the cash flows they produce is fundamental to value creation.

Customer Value Models

Achieving higher customer satisfaction may require more resources and incur higher costs. So, it’s important to invest well. With data from a carefully designed customer satisfaction survey, we can develop a Customer Value Model for our customers and find out what services or produces they most value.  For example, should you invest in hiring more engineers or instead invest in new technologies? Customer Value Models can help a company focus on the highest value areas, and hopefully benefit from the bigger financial return.

Example:

A client has asked for a quick response on a service request. A.) Your engineer could spend a few days preparing a thorough quotation whilst the customer is waiting. B.) Alternatively the engineer could respond with a basic quote and deliver the service with a short lead time.

You know your customers – your Customer Value Model indicates that they place a high value on quick results. Go with B.) and as a result the client will feel you listened to their needs, and your company will be the winner.

Yes, it can be that simple! Do you have a model in place – and when’s the last time you measured your customer satisfaction? Are they happy?

The next question is how can you put a proper process in place to work things out?

References

[1] Claes Fornell, Sunil Mithas, Forrest V. Morgeson III, & M.S. Krishnan (2006), “Customer Satisfaction and Stock Prices: High Returns, Low Risk,” Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. 70 (January 2006), 3-14

To view this article you will need to register with CFI (http://www.cfigroup.com/resources/articles.asp)

[2] Claes Fornell, Donald C. Cook Professor of Business Administration and Director of the National Quality Research Centre

Filed under Cost efficiency, Customer Satisfaction Tagged with

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