UK Building Regulations Studio 2013 Tutorial

 

Introduction

Learn how to assess a building for 2013 Building Regulations compliance and energy certification. An energy performance certificate (EPC) is required when non-domestic buildings are built, sold, or rented, and are valid for up to 10 years. To produce an EPC you must be a qualified Energy Assessor.

 

The application you will use is called the UK Building Regulations 2013 Studio. The 2010 application is still available through the Tas Manager in the Tas\Utilities folder.

 

This guide assumes you've already set up source T3D and TBD files and the input data and assumptions are known. How you zone the source building will affect the results and therefore the predictions of energy performance. Zoning rules are explained in paragraphs 182 to 186 of the NCM modelling guide (2013). The notional and reference buildings will have the same zoning arrangement as the actual buliding.

 

 

Important! The NCM Activities database must always be used for compliance checking and energy certification. Details of occupancy, temperature set-points, fresh air rates, and heat gain profiles must not be changed regardless of how they may be in practice. This allows buildings to be compared on their intrinsic potential performance.

 

Important! Standard weather sets are available and should always be used. There are 14 weather data files available to choose from. Select a file based on the distance to the site of the proposed building. Refer to paragraph 180 of the NCM modelling guide (2013) for more information. In this example the CIBSE Test Reference Year weather data for London was used to simulate demand, consumption, and CO2 emissions for every hour of the year for both the Part L2 analysis and EPC calculation.

 

During the 2013 approval process two areas requiring user guidance have been highlighted involving ancillary consumption and metal clad buildings.

 

Ancillary Consumption

User input for ancillary consumption (e.g. de-stratification fans) is now available on the BRUKL/EPC Information screen. Click on the Project Details tab to enter the relevant values. The user should calculate these values for ancillary fan and pump consumption where appropriate. Typically they can be left at their default value of zero. It’s important to realise these are project level inputs so care needs to be taken in determining these values where the project has sub-systems that have different operating periods.

 

Metal clad buildings

These types of buildings typically have very different thermal bridging performance so care is needed in setting up the model accurately. Typical linear thermal transmittance values for non-metal and metal clad buildings are shown below.

 

 

An ideal solution would be to calculate the edge lengths in the building and apply the correct psi-values to calculate an overall additional heat loss in W/K, then apply Additional Heat Transfer (AHT) to constructions in the model to equal this additional loss. Unfortunately this will only be practical for very small, or simple, buildings.

 

A quick rule-of-thumb approach is to perform a standard calculation in Tas and then note the building Alpha value (typically 10% to 20%, generally less for industrial buildings with thinner walls) from the BRUKL document. Multiply this value by 3 and then apply this additional loss as AHT across all constructions in the model. For example, if a metal clad building has a Tas calculated Alpha of 7% then AHT of 21% needs to be applied. This modification needs to be done on the source TBD and then all NCM calculations repeated.

 

Click here to start.