Cooling season post-occupancy evaluation of a low energy complex school (City Academy) in the UK

Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE) of buildings has begun to receive more attention from the UK construction industry. In many cases, POE results indicate that even advanced designed buildings are high energy consumers and caused high levels of discomfort amongst occupants. In the UK, there is a move for routine use of POE in the construction industry. This paper discusses the in-use performance of an Advanced Naturally Ventilated secondary school building in the UK. The building features open plan classrooms, night cooling and automatically controlled solar shading and ventilation openings. The study includes (a) long term monitoring of the thermal environment in classrooms, (b) short term analysis of environmental conditions and (c) parametric analysis of environmental conditions using advanced thermal modelling. Monitored data indicate that the summertime overheating criteria was achieved using the night cooling strategy and that the open plan classrooms achieved very good Indoor Air Quality (IAQ). It was also found that the penalty for improved IAQ was worse acoustic performance in the open classrooms. It was found that the internal environment on the second floor could be improved significantly by controlling sky-light openings using information about wind direction. The information from the study is being fed back to the design team and findings incorporated in future projects.