The 2013 CIBSE Technical Symposium staged in Liverpool saw leading academics sharing their research findings with industry professionals. Recent graduate Marcus Haydon discovered that the issue of operational energy was as relevant in research circles as it is in the commercial world
ake a wander through Liverpool city centre and you can see why it made an excellent venue for the 2013 CIBSE Technical Symposium. From the neo-
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classical splendour of St George’s Hall (the world’s first air-conditioned building) to the strikingly modern Museum of Liverpool, the diversity of the architectural heritage reflects the variety of building stock we have in the UK, and the challenge we face in making it more energy efficient. The subject of energy efficiency dominated
If you have a technical innovation, this is the best forum to tell people about it. The audience won’t be mystified – they understand the relevance of building services innovations David Nicholson-Cole
the debates at the venue in Liverpool John Moores University. The opening day started on a positive note, with Justin Snoxall explaining how British Land had cut overall energy use in a set of their buildings by 39%. The head of British Land’s business group highlighted that these savings were delivered through new management procedures and plant controls. The need for external advice was interesting,
given that the buildings were not old (almost all were less than 10 years old) and had a team of building engineers looking after them. That notion of ‘operability’ was a strong
thread running through the two-day event, with delegates expressing diverse views on how we, as designers, should be approaching the topic. Indeed, the question of whether buildings should be ‘designed to be operated’
14 CIBSE Journal May 2013
was debated, with Mike Smith of BSRIA remarking that the current procurement and commissioning process relied on a kind of miraculous ‘osmosis of knowledge’ between the building designer and building operator – a process that rarely seems to occur as intended. Another delegate, Larry Spielvogel, suggested that designers might take their responsibilities more seriously if they were forced into operating one of the buildings they had designed. There were a number of poster pitch sessions, too – informally dubbed ‘CIBSE’s version of speed dating’. University College London’s Energy Institute PhD student Carrie Behar analysed user perspectives on whole- house ventilation, which revealed that almost all householders struggled to understand the processes and controls involved. As the airtightness of buildings increases, the relentless pursuit of energy reductions does risk overlooking the actual users of a building. While the use of renewable energy sources continues to grow, consultants can be left in a challenging position when looking to accurately size these systems and predict their performance. As a consequence, there is often a lot of reliance on manufacturers who, as Cliver Earp of B&ES pointed out, aren’t necessarily impartial when it comes to
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