The life cycle assessment (LCA) method is a powerful tool that can serve to aid decision making regarding the environmental benefits of refurbishment projects. However, due to the relative complexity of LCA studies, simplified LCA methodologies are frequently used, focusing on just some of the building life cycle phases or a reduced number of indicators. The most common and widespread simplification is to only evaluate the differences a refurbishment project makes on the operational energy use of the building. This paper compares the results of applying full LCA, simplified LCA and operational energy use assessment in a refurbishment case study. Results show that simplified LCA methodologies including building use phase and product manufacturing phase can generally be sufficiently accurate to aid decision making for building energy refurbishment, as other building life cycle phases related to transport of products, on site construction, deconstruction or end of life represent a generally negligible part of the total life cycle impacts, both in terms of resource use or environmental impacts. Barriers and benefits of applying simplified LCA approaches to building energy refurbishment projects are subsequently discussed.
User behaviour influences the energy consumption of domestic properties with different range of variations and this has an effect on the results of building simulations based on default or general values, as opposed to implementing user behaviour. The aim of this paper is to evaluate and quantify the effect of implementing user behaviour in building dynamic simulation to calculate heating and domestic how water energy consumption to reduce the performance gap. The results for space heating and domestic hot water from dynamic building simulations will be compare to actual energy bills for a general building simulation technique and a calibrated building simulation, incorporating user behaviour details. By using user behaviour details to create calibrated building simulations, a correlation to actual energy bills of over 90 % can be achieved for a dataset of 22 properties. This study has shown that by incorporating user behaviour into building simulations, a more accurate estimation of energy consumption can be achieved. More importantly, the methodology approach allows the user behaviour parameters to be collected by means of a questionnaire, providing an easy and low budget approach to incorporate user behaviour into dynamic building simulations to reduce the performance.
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