EASY DOES IT

摘要

there's a new phrase doing the rounds. Sessions at Ecobuild were full of it. The Green Construction Board is funding work into it. The Zero Carbon Hub has been given ￡380,000 by Eric Pickles to research it. It's The Performance Gap. For those of us close to the subject, there's a certain weary black comedy about this. There's nothing new about the gap between how buildings are designed to perform and how they actually do. The PROBE building performance studies identified the problem in the mid-1990s. The Carbon Trust's Low Carbon Building Performance Programme of 2006 found the same. Despite funding a team of consultants to support the application of low and zero carbon technologies, the Trust was shocked to find that the benefits were often insignificant. In 2011, the Technology Strategy Board started an ￡8m, four-year research programme to evaluate the performance of new domestic and non-domestic buildings. And guess what, it's finding similar things. So-called sustainable domestic dwellings, with their heat pumps, solar panels and mechanical ventilation, are catching the same disease: unmanageable complexity coupled with poor finishing off, inadequate commissioning, and utterly baffling control systems. The result is high energy consumption and alienated householders.