CIBSE TECHNICAL SYMPOSIUM 2012
were awarded their CIBSE award. Neil Caswell said the team focused on ‘delivery’ from the earliest stages of design, ensuring positive collaboration with clear, active and identified lines of communication between all the project’s professionals, including operational staff. On a smaller scale, the presentation
voted by delegates to have made the ‘most significant contribution to the art and science of building services engineering’ was by David Nicholson-Cole of Nottingham University. He convincingly showed that, in his experience, the operational ‘zero carbon’ house is very much a reality. Using his own home as a living lab,
Nicholson-Cole has installed a number of solar thermal and solar photovoltaic devices. As well as providing a direct source of heat for domestic hot water, the solar thermal panels play a critical role in ‘recharging’ the ground in summer to replace the heat removed by the boreholes feeding ground-source heat pumps. Without this seasonal charge there was a year- on-year drop in performance. Nicholson-Cole reported that his team
was looking at applying similar techniques to very tall buildings for sites in New York and London, using intermediate thermal stores on mechanical floors. He maintains a regular detailed blog documenting the work, including measurements and candid observations, at http://chargingtheearth.
blogspot.co.uk There was much talk of benchmarking and measurement at the Symposium, both in the sessions and during the ‘networking’ breaks. Phil Jones of Building Energy Solutions gave a spirited presentation where he spoke of the essential part that log books, sub-metering and automatic meter reading (AMR) play in managing energy in large buildings. (And when questioned Jones was clear that he was not talking of smart meters, but simply of meters that were capable of transmitting consumption data). He said there are now a significant number
of non-domestic buildings in the UK where AMR is operating successfully and is helping to drive down energy consumption, but in many cases they have failed to live up to expectations. Log books are often non-existent or ignored and sub-metering is seen as incidental to the management process. Often, the way AMR has been introduced
has left building managers with a tool they can’t use. Jones said that vast improvement was possible using current technologies, but the industry is in need of improved training, guidance and regulation.
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And in terms of the current reality of reporting the performance of buildings, the presentation by Benedict Vanheems of DeMontfort University explored whether Display Energy Certificates (DECs) are playing a part in helping to drive down building energy consumption. Based on surveys of active practitioners, his work showed that DECs have limited influence on building occupant behaviour, but are a motivator for those involved in the management of building energy consumption. His work has shown that energy managers
use the output from the certificates to make the case for more resources to improve building performance. But they identified areas that could make the DEC a more robust instrument, including the quality of the advisory report, which is generally felt to be of a poor standard and not specific enough. Furthermore, he noted that questions on the accuracy of benchmarks used for the calculation of operational ratings threaten to undermine their usefulness. Sarah Russell-Smith of Stanford University
extolled the potential benefits of building information modelling (BIM) to feed real building data into life-cycle assessment methods, making their collective use more valuable. CIBSE president Andy Ford (now immediate past-president) closed the symposium by affirming that the sharing of knowledge was fundamental both to innovation and true progress in building services systems, and that he had been energised by the enthusiasm and diversity of the contributors. CJ
l TIM DWYER is CIBSE Journal’s technical editor and a teaching fellow at University College London. All the presentations and papers are available at
www.cibse.org/symposium2012
CIBSE president Andy Ford affirmed that the sharing of knowledge is fundamental to innovation and true progress in building services
Symposium delegates visit the exhibition stalls
June 2012 CIBSE Journal 19
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