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 , , , , , ,

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

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.