Energy retrofit and occupant behaviour in protected housing: A case study of the Brunswick Centre in London

Abstract

 Behaviour change has the highest energy-saving potential in listed housing retrofit.  The impact of behaviour change can range up to 62% to 86% of the total energy saving.  The lower behaviour change effect is associated with a higher retrofit level.  Heating temperature has the highest impact on energy use amongst behaviour variables.

Impact of occupant behaviour on the energy-saving potential of retrofit measures for a public building in the UK

“…As heating and window operations have been identified in previous studies as the most important behavioural types affecting the building heating demand in winter ( With respect to defining extreme window and heating users, only two existing studies have been found that are based on field measured data in real buildings, one for heating behaviour (Ben and Steemers, 2014) and another for window behaviour (Wei 2014). According to these publications, active heating users were defined as those who set heating temperature as 24°C, and passive heating users were those who set heating temperature to be 18°C; active window users were defined as those who always keep windows open, and passive window users were those who always keep windows closed.…”

“…In this process, identification of retrofit options using reliable data is essential for a successful building refurbishment project. To provide evidence for selecting suitable refurbishment measures, dynamic building performance simulation tools, such as TRNSYS (Santamouris et al 2007), EnergyPlus (Wei, Jones, and de Wilde 2014;Ascione, de Rossi, and Vanoli 2011;Chidiac et al 2011), IES VE (Ben and Steemers 2014) and DOE-2 (Zmeureanu 1990), have been widely used in real projects.…”

Design the refurbishment of historic buildings with the cost-optimal methodology: The case study of a XV century Italian building

“…Zagorskas et al [9] have discussed the problems of moisture in brick wall construction and a method for selecting the best insulating alternative is shown. Ben and Steemers [10] have underlined that, for protected housing in London, a mere behavioural change has the potential for allowing significant energy saving, higher than those derived from a physical improvements. Moreover, several studies show that energy efficiency can also be greatly improved through the optimization of building envelope (replacement of windows, doors) and by means of a rational management of HVAC systems.…”

Virtual home energy auditing at scale: Predicting residential energy efficiency using publicly available data

“…Ben and Steemers [9] examined the impact of behavioral and physical variables on the energy savings from retrofit projects using data from a 407-apartment complex in London, UK. They concluded that behavioral change plays a crucial role in developing integrative strategies for listed housing retrofit.…”