CASE STUDY

Energy Performance Certificate for a multi-storey office block

Introduction

The case study illustrates the use of DesignBuilder SBEM to produce an Energy Performance
Certificate (EPC) and Recommendation Report for a level 4 office building. It demonstrates how a
large building with a complex geometry can be quickly modelled using DesignBuilder SBEM and
how the data inheritance tools within the software allow data to be quickly entered into the model.
These tools greatly enhance the productivity of Energy Assessors using DesignBuilder SBEM
providing them with a competitive advantage.

The Building

The owners of this 1979 four storey office block commissioned Safety Management and Monitoring
Services Limited based at Huddersfield to prepare an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) for
their building. David Higham, the Energy Management Consultant assigned to the project has used
DesignBuilder SBEM to produce the EPC.

Building Geometry

The building consists of two office blocks arranged in an L shape and joined by a circulation area
containing lifts, stairs and corridors with a plant room at the top level. There are further stair wells at
each end of the office blocks as illustrated in the picture above. Modelling the building presented a
considerable challenge due to its shape and range of building services which required the full range
of tools within DesignBuilder SBEM to be deployed.

The ground floor block was created by importing a DXF file and tracing around the outline. As the
outline is the same for the three floors above these were created using the clone tool to make copies
of the ground floor. The internal floor layouts were also imported in the DXF files for each floor.
Parts of the internal layout such as the stairs and circulation area between the office blocks are the
same on all floors and were copied from the ground floor layout thus saving further time.

A further simplification of the building model

was achieved by using hanging partitions to
create cellular offices as one zone. This is
illustrated in the floor plan right where a
number of cellular offices with the same
building services are included as one zone

Entering Building Data

This is a relatively large building of nearly 4000m2 with a considerable number of activity zones. It
was therefore important to develop a strategy for loading the building data that exploits the data
inheritance features of DesignBuilder in order to minimize the time and effort required.

Constructions and facades are common to the whole building which allowed these data to be entered
at the building level and hence be inherited down to the surface level in each zone. Where a
particular façade had no glazing or a different percentage of glazing the data was edited at surface
level.

The lighting is mainly fluorescent tubes of varying ages and types. The strategy adopted was to
count the number of tubes in each zone and to calculate the installed load including the ballast.

Heating is predominantly by room heaters of various types and efficiencies, while cassette units
were installed in some meeting rooms and offices to provide local air conditioning. The strategy
employed was to define an HVAC system for each system and assign it to the relevant blocks or
zones.

Data was entered in each of the five tabs as described below.

Activities

The activities in the building are typical of those found in offices and include open and cellular
offices, circulation areas, toilets, storage etc. They were assigned to each zone by selecting from the
prescribed list of SBEM office activities
Constructions

This heavyweight poorly insulated building has a single external wall construction for all parts of
the building. This allowed the external wall construction to be specified once at building level
whereupon this construction was applied to all external walls in the building. Similarly for roofs and
floors etc. This feature of DesignBuilder allows data to be entered much quicker than some other
software tools such as iSBEM.

Openings

The building has a uniform pattern of glazing on most facades. The required information regarding
glazing type and areas of glazing was entered at building level and hence applied initially to all
facades of the building. The area of the glazing was set by moving the slider to specify the areas of
glazing as percentage of the wall area. The glazing type was selecting from a drop down menu. In
this building some facades have no glazing or reduced areas of glazing. These surfaces were simply
selected from the navigation tree and the area of glazing adjusted using the slider.

Lighting

Electric lighting is predominantly supplied by fluorescent tubes some of which are the older
halophosphate tubes with standard ballasts. In each zone the installed load was estimated by
counting the fittings and multiplying by the wattage including that for the ballast. Design
illluminance was assumed to be that recommended by CIBSE unless it was obviously higher or
lower when estimated values were used. The estimated lighting load in W/m2 and design
illuminance were entered for each zone. Lighting control is manual throughout the building.

HVAC

Heating is predominantly by local room heaters of various ages and efficiencies. The most common
type is other local room heaters - unfanned from the SBEM menu. A number of room heaters were
defined with different Seasonal Energy Efficiency Ratios (SEER) and these were allocated at block
and zone level as appropriate. The meeting rooms on the second floor have cassette units fitted as do
a few offices. A further HVAC system was defined for these using the split and multi-split option in
the SBEM menu. These few simple steps allowed the correct HVAC system to be applied
throughout the building.

DHW

DHW is supplied by a stand alone water heater using grid electricity and incorporating a
227 litre storage vessel. Hot water is supplied to each floor by a secondary circulation loop
using a 0.95 kW pump. In DesignBuilder the DHW generator is entered at building level so
that it is automatically assigned to all the occupied zones as required for the SBEM
calculation.
Comment by David Higham, Energy Assessor
“Our company produces EPCs for large buildings with complex shapes and building services. DesignBuilder
has proved an invaluable tool to enable me to do this. The drawing tools and data inheritance have greatly
reduced the time required to model the building and enter data”

The EPC

The EPC was produced by clicking on the

calculate tab and selecting EPC England. As
would be expected for this 1979 poorly
insulate building the asset rating is a
relatively poor 112 which puts the building
in band E. Clearly there is considerable
scope to improve the insulation and services
in this building – see recommendations
below.

Recommendations

The recommendations report has been

reviewed by David Higham, the Energy
Assessor for this project, who has removed
some recommendations and added
recommendations of his own.
Recommendations are grouped into short,
medium and long payback with a further
section ‘Other recommendations’ showing
recommendation added by the Assessor. An
example of the short payback
recommendations is shown on the right.

More about DesignBuilder SBEM

More details about DesignBuilder SBEM and the training package available from
DesignBuilder Certification can be found at www.dbcert.co.uk. Enquiries can be made to
admin@dbcert.co.uk or by telephone on 01442 866378 or 07774 161708.