| Project summary: |
The Greenfields Community Housing (GCH) Headquarters building in Braintree, Essex is a bespoke office building providing two distinct functions - open plan and cellular offices supporting Greenfields' employees, and community facilities providing an interface for Greenfields' tenants
The brief from the client was to maximise the energy efficiency of the building while keeping in mind the comfort and experience of its users, both staff and visitor members of the community.
The building, which has been awarded BREEAM Very Good,is designed to combine passive measures and low carbon technologies to achieve an energy efficient and comfortable environment.
The focus on the BPE study was to look at the effectiveness of the environmental strategy applied in the building, including the occupant controlled natural ventilation and BMS controlled night purge ventilation, ground source heat pumps and the controls set up to coordinate the interaction of all the services.
There were delays to the start of the monitoring exercise due to complications with setting up the sub-metering to provide useful data through the BMS and access to a useful interface with the BMS, which was finally provided by the owner of the building to support the research project. A detailed building walkthrough and thermography exercise was carried out in addition to interviews with members of staff and the design team.
The study revealed information about how well the BMS was being managed by the facilities team and suggestions were made on how cost and energy savings could be made. There were also very useful inferences drawn for the design team on the success of the proposed strategy and how it was vital to involve building users throughout the project to ensure they understand how any new or innovative systems could be best used and manage expectations where needed.
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