Activity areas in a building
Your assessor will need to know the floor area (in meter sq or sq feet) of the building along with information about the various activity areas or zones within the building. You may be able to locate the measurements and zones from plans on the building, a lease and/or building documentation such as an operations and maintenance manual.
If this information is not available your assessor will have to physically measure the building and create sketches or you may choose to have a suitably competent person on your staff carry out the measurements in keeping with the measurement conventions required by the Assessor. For multi-building sites measurements must clearly identify the areas of each part of the building, or of each building on the site, that you occupy.
For an EPC's asset rating the overall dimensions of a building, allocated to specific zones are essential to enable a 'model' of the energy usage to be produced by your assessor.
The asset rating of a building is created by modelling the building in its entirety. This means that the volumetric space must be defined in detail and zoned according to a number of factors which includes the following;
• Physical Boundaries (i.e. Walls, Floors, Roofs)
• Activity Areas
• Conditioning Strategy (heating,cooling)
• Lighting Strategy
• Daylight Modelling (not essential but required for greater accuracy)
The zoning of the building will 'model' the predicted energy demand of the building by calculating the need for ventilation, heating, cooling and lighting.
Useful Terms
(The) 'Energy Hierarchy'
The energy hierarchy was conceived in 1998 as part of the local government position statement on energy. It is fundamentally the order in which energy saving and 'green' energy measures should be prioritised, focussing on the reduction and conservation of energy use before considering renewable energy.
Model (of Building)
The building is modelled through the application of zones, the input of activities and services and construction properties to enable the energy consumption to be calculated. The building model, even at the most basic level, wil take into consideration the lighting and heating factors of a zone and the calculated consumption profiles of the services providing it.
National Calculation Methodology
The National Calculation Method for the EPBD (Energy Performance of Buildings Directive) is the procedure for calculating the asset rating for buildings other than dwellings. It calculates the asset rating by calculating the annual energy use for a proposed building and comparing it with the energy use of a comparable 'notional' building. Both calculations make use of standard sets of data for different activity areas and call on common databases of construction and service elements.