Bridging the performance gap - useful links

1. Free access to Soft Landings guidance for clients, users and architects to set expectations and performance targets on energy and end-user satisfaction from inception to completion.

2. Usable Building Trust, dedicated to improving building performance by understanding how buildings perform in use and how this can feedback in building design. Some really useful publication links.

3. Institute for Sustainability guide to Building Performance Evaluation (BPE) in retrofits, with simple 'in-use BPE' here and recommended detailed in-use investigations here and specialist testing for major retrofits. General site here, includes guidance for domestic and non-domestic.

4. The AJ's Bridge The Gap Campaign and performance gap info.

5. Carbon Buzz has several case studies of buildings' predicted and actual energy use, and you can upload your own projects too. Write up of the launch event here.

6. AECB Soapbox - Paul Buckingham on construction problems leading to performance gap. 

7. AECB member Jake White has started a government e-petition calling on government to “Address the "performance gap" in low carbon buildings before setting higher performance standards."

8. Historic Scotland has freely available research on the in-situ performance  of existing building structures, highlighting that assumed U-values in RdSAP and literature may overestimate heatloss from traditional pre-1919 building fabric. 

9. Carbon Trust document on Closing the Gap and by Gary Clark in AJ.

10. Courtesy of Elrond Burrell: The Government’s Soft Landings policy:”Post Operational Evaluation will be used as a collaborative tool to measure and optimise asset performance and embed lessons learnt.” This is proposed to apply to all new and major refurbishments in Central Government in 2016.

11. Roger Hunt writes about the performance gap too in ShowHouse.

12. The Building Centre’s/Buro Happold’s ‘Mind the Gap’ event,

13. The CIBSE 2014 Building Performance Awards, based on actual building energy performance not design intent, while the Passivhaus Trust awards also work along similar principles. 

14. The Zero Carbon Hub announced its ‘Designed v As-Built (DvAB) research’, particularly related to the performance gap in dwellings, which follows on from the NHBC’s 2012 report‘Low and zero carbon homes: understanding the performance challenge (NF41)’

15. Christopher Gorse from LeedsMet wrote on ‘Closing the Performance Gap’ at STN News while this week UKGBC Pinpoint is undertaking a discussion on BSRIA’s Soft landings framework. Discussion here. 

16. Kate de Selincourt recommended following articles ( and also have a look at the first blog post as further reading there too):

• "The Leeds Met study of JRT's refurb on a standard semi, finding both better-than-expected performance of the unimproved building, and worse-than-expected performance after both a "standard" then "deep" retrofit. 

• A good, thorough look at the issues wrt retrofit from Leeds Met here - including observations about 'construction culture' at the end of theme 2. 

• Paper here on the 'prebound' effect -ie, you don't get the savings you expected, because people don't use as much before the improvements as you think. 
• And thoughtful paper by Bob Lowe and Summerfield on research and why it doesn't get "traction"
  

17. Courtesy of Rory Bergin - Initial Retrofit for Future analysis report


18. " Should We Expect Energy Modeling to Predict Building Performance?"o or "The real value of modeling is not predicting energy use but making relative comparisons among design options" and also here. 


19. 'People do matter' --> write up by Nic Combe of CIBSE YEPG event.


20. AJ's Performance Gap panel reports back. (Aug 1st 2013)


21. Rory Bergin on what he thinks Performance gaps reasons are. (Aug 2013)


22. Zero Carbon Hub's preliminary findings can be downloaded here; and summary of main findings here.


23. CIBSE TM54 Evaluating Energy Use at the Design Stage is a guide - due later in 2013 - to enable designers to make better operational energy use predictions. (Calculations used for Part L compliance are not appropriate to predict operational energy use.)


24. CIBSE PROBE studies (POE).