How do you carry out your residential Post Occupancy Evaluations?
We are committed to undertaking POEs on our past projects. However, residential buildings present challenges with distributed ownership and individual metering, sometimes combined with CHPs and renewable energy generation managed by private companies.
So, to find out how our buildings perform, we have to speak to the residents directly. How do you make sharing utility bill data an attractive proposition to busy people who may never have been asked such a thing before? Can you use this as a very light touch educational moment about the role of buildings as part of our climate commitments, without patronising or scaring people off?
We’re currently looking for feedback on Wick Lane, a mixed-use project with a combination of light industrial and workspace co-located with 175 homes. To find out how people feel about living there we’re asking residents to share their experiences so; to connect with residents individually, we printed up postcards which we posted through every letterbox on site. These had QR codes linking to an online survey, and alongside this we put up posters with information about the aims of our data gathering. We approached local businesses with a view to offering vouchers to encourage people to take part and are also offering retail vouchers as an extra incentive. The survey window is three weeks, and we received 9 responses in the first 72 hours.
The survey covers their views on the physical building, the indoor environment (which takes in acoustics, humidity, temperature and daylight) as well as asking people to share their energy usage data, aligning to guidance set out in BS EN 40101 for Building Performance Evaluations. This study builds on our experience from Measuring Mass Timber research project.
With the information coming from the responses, we can benchmark the scheme’s performance against industry standards in relation to net zero carbon, such as the UK NZC Buildings Standard and for submitting the project for architectural awards as well as knowledge-sharing efforts. We are constantly seeking to improve how we design buildings in relation to comfort, wellbeing and sustainability. We’ve already received some surprising responses which will definitely inform how we consider similar situations on future projects.
With POEs becoming more widespread, we hope these challenges will fade in coming years. We see a real need for managed approaches to data collation, respecting GDPR and privacy but facilitating carbon reporting and learning from buildings with greater ease.
Please tell us how you do it!
#POE #PostOccupancyEvaluation #UKNZCBS
