Effects Of Renovation Solution On Energy Saving And Indoor Air Quality In A Historic Building

As a rich source of a country or society’s cultural values and heritage, historical buildings give a nation a strong sense of identity and also promote tourism leading to economic prosperity. Hence, conservation of these buildings is of paramount importance. But the conservation process suffers from several hurdles such as aging, high maintenance costs and ‘hard-to-treat’ problems, which means that many conventional renovation measures cannot be applied to improve their energy efficiency. In addition, many of these buildings are museums and art galleries which need maintenance of very tight indoor air condition to preserve the important artifacts and paintings. This demands an enormous amount of energy usage which counters both – the government’s energy and carbon policies as well as being economically sound. This paper reports a systematic study of an assessment on the effects of refurbishing the skylights on building energy consumption in a national gallery housed in a stone-built building of architectural, cultural and historical significance. Energy consumption is obtained from past years’ meter readings. As no sub-metering is available, the detailed energy usage is also predicted by a dynamic thermal model developed in a previous study. The detailed data is compared against the degree days calculated over these years. The calculation is based on hourly data and adjusted specific to the gallery environment to get adjusted energy consumption profile of the building. Finally a comparison is made before and after the refurbishment event in the gallery to highlight the useful effects of the renovation work. A comparison is also made with other similar buildings and energy benchmarks. As a part of a three-year research project of renovation of Scottish national gallery building, this work is expected to produce a realistic data for cost analysis and quantitative assessment of the renovation project. It, hopefully, will also encourage the use of quantitative assessment in developing renovation solutions for historical buildings as a part of the campaign of carbon reduction and building conservation