refurbishment

The paper introduces an approach for assessing the resilience of buildings to both current heat waves and their recurrence in the future under the impact of climate change. The method, applied to the 60,000 dwellings of the RIVP (Régie Immobilière de la Ville de Paris), the second-largest social landlord in Paris, aims to provide reliable information to enable the buildings’ owner to assess the heat-related health risk for the tenants and the actions to be taken to decrease it.

The WTA-Leaflets (International Association for Science and Technology of Building Maintenance and Monuments Preservation", (WTA)) provide recommendations on how a defined quality of building airtightness can be achieved when renovating existing buildings. These recommendations are guidelines that support planners, builder and quality inspectors involved in construction in their implementation. 
The leaflet series consists of 3 parts: 

As UK homes are insulated and draught proofed in an attempt to reduce wintertime heating demand they become more airtight. Any reduction in infiltration could have a detrimental effect on indoor air quality. Controllable background ventilation provided by trickle vents is one method of maintaining indoor air quality.

Nearly all retail locations use ventilation and cooling systems to ensure adequate air exchange for health reasons and indoor comfort temperatures. These systems can run for over 2,000 hours per year and we expect that average operating hours will continue to rise across Europe because of the continued trend towards longer opening hours and increased number of opening days. Shopping malls often enclose large open spaces and atria with high solar and internal gains that can drive ventilative cooling.

Effective conservation of historic buildings subject to monumental restrictions is realized through a re-use for modern functions. In fact an attended and therefore ventilated and climatized building can be maintained in thermo-hygrometric conditions suitable controlled in order to avoid the occurrence of mold. Often only the use can justify a timely and adequate maintenance. Although the sustainability of the requalification requires acceptable management costs and therefore a limitation of the energy consumptions which must be comparable with those today prescribed for new buildings.

This paper presents the effect of specific future climate changes scenarios on the resilience of the refurbishment of a 1960s office building in suburban London. A model of the building was created and simulated using IESVE to predict current energy consumption calibrated with operational energy data. Energy efficient improvements were incorporated which mainly consist of improving the insulation and air-tightness of external envelope, reducing solar and internal gain and utilising natural ventilation during the day and night for improving thermal comfort in the summer.

In the context of pressing and frequently conflicting environmental, economic and social policyobjectives, energy efficiency investment is repeatedly found to be a cost-effective and reconcilablecomponent of energy policies. High-rise residential buildings are a particularly salient issue in thisregard as their poor energy efficiency is regarded as a moderate to major problem by 18 out of 27housing ministries respondent to a Europe-wide survey.

Fan-pressurisation method was used to test the air infiltration rate of 191 dwellings in England. All tested homes were either pre or post the introduction of energy efficient retrofit measures such as cavity wall insulation, loft insulation, draught stripping and energy efficient heating system. Results show that the average air infiltration rate of the post dwellings is only marginally lower by 4% compared to the pre dwellings.

In two school buildings, concentrations of viable fungal spores in air, material and insurface samples were high indicating moisture and mould damages. Microbesincluded numerous moisture indicating species (e.g. Aspergillus versicolor,Trichoderma, Fusarium, Stachybotrys, Chaetomium, Streptomyces). After renovation,the school buildings were thoroughly cleaned. Surfaces still had abundant anddiversiform microflora. After repeated cleaning, abundance and diversity ofmicroflora diminished.

In France, most of the public project managers have collective dwellings built in the 70’s 80’s with first generation mechanical ventilation systems. These systems are not well perceived by the occupants who find them noisy, uncomfortable in winter and w