The estimated amount of energy that a building consumes during one year indicates whether it contributes to a sustainable society or not. The communal company, AB Gavlegårdarna , that rents out apartments, works not only with designing proposals for solutions for the future housing , they also work with improving their stock when it comes to energy consumption. The multi-family buildings of Gävle Strand Phase 1 were completed in 2008 with a population of twelve buildings that are shaped in four ways.
During the planning phase a consultant was hired to calculate the how much energy these buildings would have to purchase and came up with an energy use of 92 kWh/m2,year. Gavlegårdarna’s own calculations are based on the actual values obtained for each apartment and in September 2009 and they showed a mean value for the whole stock, which was 114 kWh/m2,year.
AB Gavlegårdarna want to find a solution to the problem and reduce the extra cost that Gävle Strand Phase 1 has given rise through increased use of energy. They want to perform precise calculations on each building's energy use. The problem can be formulated as follows:
How much influence does the malfunction of a heat exchanger in a balanced ventilation system have on the total energy consumption in apartment buildings? Can a house among the various geometrically designed houses of a stock be considered to be representative when calculating the energy use of the stock as a whole?
The report deals with a number of U-value and area calculations, ventilation and air leakage assessments, domestic hot water use and energy user behavior of the residents, to work out how much a simulated building uses in terms of specific energy, with unit kWh/m2,year. An building simulation program called BV2 2010was utilized.
The results show that the majority of the buildings located in Gävle Strand Phase 1 have higher energy consumption than the consultant's basic case. This is due to several factors but the main causes of the high residential energy use is the low temperature efficiency in the FTX-system heat exchanger, the residents’ behavior and in some cases relatively high usage of hot water.