Whole-Life Costing of a French Single-Family House Refurbishment: the “Bat-Eco2” case study

Abstract

Bat-Eco 2 is a research project on building refurbishment life cyle assessment (LCA) and whole-life costing (WLC). The project’s goal is to contribute to the development of a tool to help decision-making on refurbishment solutions, considering the environmental aspects along with the economic ones. This project has been split in four steps: (i) LCA of a standard single-family house refurbishment built in 1939 and located in Libercourt, Hauts-de-France; (ii) WLC of the same case study; (iii) crossing of LCA results with WLC ones; (iv) simplified tool specification in agreement with these results. This paper presents the WLC methodological choices and the corresponding WLC results. The WLC methodology complies with the ISO 15686-5. It details the refurbishment life cycle stages in compliance with the EN 15 978. The main choices are presented, i.e. system boundaries, economic rates, present costs for each life cycle stage, building residual value. Results enable to enumerate economic hotspots for the case study of this single-family house refurbishment. The whole-life costing is calculated using excel sheets, considering economic data from the social landlord Maison & Cités, house owner of the study case.