events | BUILD2PERFORM of existing communities; and the Home for All Seasons design, which aims to provide protection in extreme weather conditions. Air quality Sessions were well attended at the event Exhibitors at Build2Perform Live forstandardisedconstruction components. The Society of Public Health Engineers hosted a seminar on water and flood management in cities. It covered the Loading Unit Normalisation Assessment (LUNA) project a new framework for sizing domestic hot and cold water systems for residential buildings. Its aim is to reduce oversizing of services and so minimise cost, space and resource wastage. Ed Barsley, from The Environmental Design Studio, spoke about resilience in urban living, detailing projects such as: Flood Narratives, which creates tools for the communication of flood risk; Retrofitting Resilience, a methodology to assess flood risk historic retrofits In the historic buildings session, Caroline Cattini, senior engineer and energy manager at Historic England, explained how the public body is working with Professor Ian Knight at Cardiff Universitys Welsh School of Architecture to benchmark the energy use of some buildings for which it isresponsible. Any building dating from before 1919 is classed as historic, and Historic England wants to reduce its resource use and spend, as well as to understand where it uses energy. If we take the physical science theory, historic buildings should use more energy than more recently constructed buildings, said Knight. But the data Ive got shows this is not a universal truth for buildings in operation; in fact, I can show that as measured historic buildings use no more energy than recently constructed ones. Knights findings mean ventilation, thermal mass, occupancy, internal conditions and the control of building services are all much more important in defining the energy use of a historic building than the energy efficiency of the building fabric. It is quite reasonable for a building to be efficient in some aspects but not others it may be that a historic building with tall windows has a low lighting load, which may help offset some of the heating demand which may be why some of the overall [energy consumption] figures are low. Knights conclusion was that, if you are looking at energy consumption in kWh/m2, then historic buildings are no less efficient than modern designs. As an aside, Knight said the same findings are true for school buildings. He is currently monitoring 250 schools and said that the new ones currently use 50-100% more energy per square metre for heating than the Victorian schools. The bottom line is that these findings have big implications for how we address the role of building fabric in moving the whole of the built environment towards low or zero emissions in the future. The CIBSE Air Quality task group, chaired by Cundalls Ed Wealand, was launched at Build2Perform. Its focus is on advocating regulatory improvements, offering guidance on monitoring and sharing knowledge. Kathryn Woolley, an air quality consultant at SLR Consulting, offered tips to building services engineers, including keeping a store of good plant, increasing ventilation rates, and relocating or increasing the height of ventilation intakes. She also told specifiers to be aware of the wide variation in NOx levels generated by different gas-fired boilers. Ruth Calderwood, air quality manager at the City of London, said the borough had done an audit of very large combined heat and power in the Square Mile, to identify the source of NOx. They were looking to move to non-combustible forms of energy generation, and Calderwood said 75% of the air pollution in the City came from outside London. Domestic retrofits At a session on the renovation of nondomestic stock, chair Professor David Fisk asked panel members what they would do to make retrofit happen. They replied: make sure people understand buildings better; urge building managers to engage with BMS properly; and make retrofit part of all built environment courses and qualifications. David Pierpoint, chief executive at The Retrofit Academy, said a lack of training had resulted in disastrous refurbishments that had helped kill off the Green Deal. It was a very good thing, in retrospect, that the Green Deal didnt deliver a market at scale, because we clearly werent ready for it, he said. Pierpoint gave examples of projects where retrofits had led to widescale damp problems because the focus had been on insulation at the expense of ventilation. He described the role of the retrofit coordinator recommended in the Each Home Counts review. Under a new retrofit standard, PAS2035, domestic projects funded through the Energy Company Obligation will require a retrofit coordinator. Pierpoint said The Retrofit Academy and the Construction Industry Training Board have developed a Level 5 diploma course in retrofit coordination and risk management. In a session on building performance, Vercos Tom Randall said he had compared a range of clients predicted and actual building energy use, and found no correlation. There is more pressure now on services engineers to design buildings that perform as predicted, he added, because of energy disclosure initiatives 22 January 2019 www.cibsejournal.com CIBSE Jan19 pp20-23 B2P conference new.indd 22 21/12/2018 14:58