Users’ behaviours, management and technical solutions: a fundamental integration for low carbon buildings. The case of Roma Tre University

Considering that buildings are responsible for more than 40% of energy consumption, that the energy situation is critical and European legislation is more and more restrictive, a good way to reconcile economy and sustainability logics seems to be the “bearable” management of existing buildings. This is possible by monitoring building performances and energy consumption and by evaluating management strategies and users’ behaviours. For performing such procedures, a web platform was developed by Aedas and UCL: Carbon Buzz. Within the research project: “From design to management: a benchmarking process for the energy efficiency of buildings”, carried out by Roma Tre University together with UCL and AEDAS, a new version of the British platform was designed in order to meet the Italian situation and detect “proofs” of the actual effectiveness of design solutions. An early database of case studies made it possible to carry out a double investigation: on the one hand to compare building parameters with consumptions/CO2 emissions in a sample of buildings with the same end use, and on the other, to compare design and in-use data for single buildings. In this paper, this first part of the research is dealt with briefly, having been widely described also in other papers, while the following part, that represents a further deepening of the international project, is dealt with more exhaustively, analysing results that had never been published before. The comparison between the levels of performance predicted during the design stage and those measured at the “in-use” stage, showed a gap that seems mainly due to unregulated energy uses. The work then focused on protocols of Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE) and occupancy data (times, spaces and ways of use). An enquiry was made in one of the university buildings, as a pre-test of the methodology, and tools were devised for the contextual survey and analysis of objective aspects (building performances and management) and subjective aspects (users’ opinions and behaviours) concerning comfort levels. Using specific procedures, such as the comparison to thresholds of both the actual performances offered by the analysed spaces and the percentages of users expressing different levels of satisfaction and importance for each enquiry field, the collected data were processed and assessed. On the basis of these first results, by turning precise values into similar synthetic ranges of values, representing quality and appraisal levels, it was possible to make a comparison between subjective and objective evaluations of some wellbeing conditions. The aim was to understand, on the one hand, how much occupants affect unregulated loads, on the other, how they perceive their indoor environment. Therefore, causes of dissatisfaction for the wellbeing conditions in the heating period, and consequent symptoms of ailment, were also detected. The applied methodology enables one to address the issues that are most urgent and relevant for users, to identify which aspects need to be improved, both from architectural (technical solutions, components and systems) and operational (ways of use and management) viewpoints, and finally which are the priorities for action. Further steps in the research, as better explained in the paper, are already planned.

Considering that buildings are responsible for more than 40% of energy consumption and that the energy situation is critical and European legislation is more and more restrictive, a good way to reconcile economy and sustainability logics seems to be the “bearable” management of existing buildings. This is possible by monitoring building performances and energy consumption and by evaluating management strategies and users’ behaviours. This paper presents a web platform for performing such procedures. Based on the British platform Carbon Buzz, developed by Aedas and UCL, a new version was designed to meet the Italian situation and detect “proofs” of the actual effectiveness of design solutions. An early database of case studies enabled us to carry out a double investigation: on the one hand we compared building parameters with consumptions/CO2 emissions in a sample of buildings with the same end use, and on the other, we compared design and in-use data for single buildings. An enquiry was made in one of the buildings as a pre-test of the tools devised for surveying and observing both technical and management aspects and users’ opinions and behaviours. Using a specific procedure, the collected data were processed and assessed. On the basis of these first results, a comparison was made between subjective and objective evaluations of some wellbeing conditions. Moreover, causes of dissatisfaction and consequent symptoms of ailment were detected.