Ask the Expert Q&A, 6 February – The Importance of Strong Relationships to Sustainability with Kristina Lomas
Kristina Lomas, Founder of Eco Affinity, with be answering your questions on sustainability on 6 February between 2-3pm GMT.
The Importance of Strong Relationships to Sustainability
Over the past 10 years I have worked across a diverse range of sectors to help people increase the sustainability of their organisations.
In the majority of cases the client’s key objectives for my support were (and continue to be) to save energy, money and carbon, with minimum outlay.
At the start of my career I believed (perhaps naively) that the majority of low cost energy saving opportunities would have been implemented by 2015.
However my experience supports the contrary…that there remains significant opportunity to save energy with minimal outlay.
Research[i] highlighted by the Association of Energy Engineers (AEE) in a recent training course mirrors this experience. It finds that on balance, buildings with the most energy efficient technologies are not performing as well as those with relatively inefficient technologies.
Further investigation revealed that the buildings with inefficient technologies benefited from superior management and control of the building’s services.
The emerging theme is that many ‘low cost’ opportunities and ‘high cost’ mistakes arise from sub-optimal management and control of building services.
AEE provide further insight by highlighting that “malfunctioning automated systems are often worse than malfunctioning manual systems. The problems usually cost more and are harder to fix.”[ii]
However the problems go beyond expense, particularly for the heritage sector where these systems are integral to creating the internal environment and can negatively affect the well being of the occupants, the conservation of the objects and the experience of the visitors.
So should we stay with manually operated building services or do we need to develop greater technical competency to improve our management and control of modern systems?
I believe the answer is neither but an approximation of both. First and foremost building occupants need to get more involved with their building and its services in order to understand them better within a relational, rather than purely technical context.
In order to explain this I need to ask you to imagine your building as a whole system…In fact, a whole eco-system with many sub-systems that have inter-active and inter-dependent components.
Let’s take this further and now imagine our buildings as living, breathing entities that past and current generations give purpose and character to. The whole building and its sub-systems are designed to create the conditions required to support the ‘life within’, including ventilation, light, heat, water and waste management activities.
These sub-systems not only serve the internal world, but they must also work in harmony with the building fabric – a protective skin that is vital to creating and supporting this micro-climate.
Systems also require feedback loops to ensure adjustments can be made when external or internal conditions change, for example, temperature thermostats that prompt the heating system to compensate for solar gain or for heat released by additional occupants.
We need to understand the inter-dependencies and relationships that exist within and between our systems to ensure that our building eco-system remains healthy.
However to do this more fully, we need to see ourselves within this human-made eco-system and understand the connection and type of relationship we should have in order to exist as a strong, cohesive whole.
It is working with staff at Thackray Medical Museum in Leeds that has highlighted the importance of connection and relationship to building management and all aspects of sustainability. Staff are planning a redevelopment project and their core theme is to ‘re-connect with the building’.
The building housing Thackray Medical Museum began life as a workhouse – it was originally designed for this purpose – however its transition from a workhouse to a war hospital, to an NHS hospital and then to a Medical Museum has seen many changes made to the building and its services.
The present guardians of this building wish to reveal an important part of its history that is currently obscured by years of change. This history is part of our present, not only in terms of who we are but also with respect to the physical presence of the building.
The original building fabric continues to provide the ‘skin we live in’ and needs to be understood in a relational capacity to its external and internal environment and systems.
By following a desire to reconnect with the building, staff are moving through a process of understanding and re-integrating the parts of the system that are needed to make a healthy, cohesive whole.
Could it be that the introduction of relatively complex building services and controls has commonly led to a degree of disconnect with the buildings we occupy? Perhaps even led to a disintegrated approach to achieving our objectives in situations where the built environment is integral to what we do and how we feel when we occupy it?
To be clear, I am not advocating a roll back to systems that rely on frequent manual intervention and control. When functioning correctly, the advancement and automation of building service technologies has vastly improved our living conditions and the efficiency with which those conditions are achieved.
Technicians are vital to maintaining and optimising our systems, but to keep the whole system balanced and healthy we need to continue to enquire upon the nature of our connection and relationship to our (built) environment.
If (with some support) we understand the relationships between our goals and our building’s systems and sub-systems, perhaps we will be inspired and able to manage the whole more effectively.
From the museums sector and Joanna Macy[iii] I have learnt something that I believe is fundamental to achieving and maintaining sustainability – that is, by varying degrees, everything is connected and that everything that is connected has a relationship. In order to keep connections strong, relationships must be understood and attended to.
Connecting and relating to our buildings and their services is vitally important to protecting our heritage and environment.
My questions to you are:
Do you feel connected to your building and its systems? What is the nature of your relationship to it?
Kristina Lomas, will be answering your questions on The Importance of Strong Relationships to Sustainability on Friday 6 February 2015 between 2-3pm GMT.
About the Q&A
You can post questions before the Q & A session, on 6 February, or you can converse in real time with our expert. You can use the comment box below to post a question, or you can use twitter with the hashtag #mdyask.
Comments have to be moderated, to protect the blog from spam, so if your comment doesn’t appear straight away, don’t worry. We’ll get to it as quickly as we can.
If you have a problem submitting questions, either in the comment box, or via twitter, please email your questions to gillian.waters@ymt.org.uk
If you have ideas for subjects you’d like to see us cover in future, or would like to take questions yourself, please get in contact with us and let us know.
[i] Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (US DOE); AEE Certified Energy Manager Training Course: December 2014
[ii] Source: AEE Certified Energy Manager Training Course; December 2014
[iii] http://www.joannamacy.net/livingsystems.html
Your Comments
Rachel Wade |
Hi Kristina,
This is really interesting, and something that I don’t think people give much thought to on a daily basis.
Living in York, I live and work in old buildings which have had many uses. I like the fact that these buildings still exist rather than being bulldozed for something new, and that their usage is still evolving. That said, it concerns me that much of their history has been lost, possibly forever.
I guess the most important question is – who is responsible, and what can they do to preserve and promote a building’s heritage?
Rachel (Communications Assistant for York Musseums Trust)
Kristina Lomas |
Hello everyone, my name is Kristina Lomas, I am a sustainability professional and founder of a not-for-profit sustainability consultancy called eco affinity. I have had the pleasure of working on museum support programmes in the North East and Yorkshire for over five years now, with a strong focus on energy and resource management. My work focuses on improving energy and resource management systems that are important to achieving organisational goals and increasing our collective well-being and resilience.
Kristina Lomas |
Hi Rachel, thanks for your comments and very interesting question. As you know there are measures (listed buildings) in place to help safeguard all or certain aspects of the physical history of our buildings. However I understand your concern as relating more to the ‘loss of story’ (that characteristics of the building fabric and services will give clue to) that may have occurred during the evolutionary phases of the building. (Please advise if I have misunderstood.) This of course could apply to any building but I suspect that this is less of an issue in buildings that had some longevity and continuity of ownership/occupancy compared to one that hasn’t.
Understanding the history of the building is vitally important to my work to ensure energy measures work in harmony with the design intent of the building fabric. I always ask questions about the historical uses of buildings (even relatively new ones) and quite often they cannot be answered so I think your question of responsibility is hugely poignant on many levels. Perhaps it would be really helpful (as a minimum) for every building to legally have (and retain for perpetuity) a record of use which could take a more integrated approach to building use, capturing key information on social history, design intent, adaptation requirements etc. It could be electronically stored and archived for current and future reference.
Many buildings already have a collection of manuals, usually a mix of dated and current technical drawings and descriptions but we need something that everyone can understand. Something that enables us to relate building and system design to the end user and their needs, giving us a more rounded history and understanding of the building and the people it has sheltered. This does not necessarily promote a building’s heritage but at least we would then have a solid starting point for every building going forward.
I think readers must have many more suggestions on “who is responsible, and what they can do to preserve and promote a building’s heritage” and I would love to hear them.
Gillian Waters |
Hi Kristina,
Why is it that high technology solutions are less efficient as manual technologies?
Gillian
Kristina Lomas |
Hi Gillian, thanks for your question. In terms of their design high technology solutions are not less efficient than manually controlled technologies…however it is in their commissioning or use that high technologies can be less efficient than manually controlled technologies. The key area of energy in-efficiency or energy wastage occurs in how well or how badly the equipment is controlled.
Gillian Waters |
Hi Kristina, thanks. So is it human usage rather than technology that affects the efficiency of the systems?
Gilian
Kristina Lomas |
Gillian, to elaborate a little further on my answer..Building conditions can be strongly influenced by factors such as external temperatures, wind and humidity and internal sources of heat and moisture (people, lighting, equipment, activities etc). Internal conditions will vary from hour to hour, day to night and season to season. An effective control strategy will ensure the equipment can respond to changing demands, modulating up and down in accordance with demand.
Common control issues can include:
• Inadequate or faulty sensors sending inaccurate temperature or air quality readings
• Ineffective location of sensors – not broadly representative of the area to be conditioned
• Running equipment longer or shorter than necessary – e.g. due to variable occupancy and/or variable external temperatures
• Running equipment harder than necessary – there are a number of potential causes here such as turning up the thermostat in the (false) belief it will heat the premises up more quickly. Or running equipment at a fixed speed across the year.
• Using fixed parameters such as fixed temperature set points when need may vary according to changes of use e.g. intermittently used rooms and spaces where lower ‘set-back’ temperatures could be employed in between uses.
Kristina Lomas |
Hi Gillian,
It is both. There is always a human factor to efficiency, whether it is in development an effective control strategy or being able to identify when technology is failing to deliver services to an expected (designed) level of efficiency.
Gillian Waters |
Hi Kristina,
I was just wondering- do you think our new technologies are too complex to be easily used by everyone?
Gillian
Gillian Waters |
I only ask as I have been baffled by rooms with lights that come on when you walk in. I view the room from the outside and look for a light switch. I have also found that you need to keep moving with these lights as they can go out when you sit working at a computer!
Kristina Lomas |
Hi Gillian, they can be complex depending on how user friendly the user interface or controls are. A key issue is that staff responsible for the system are commonly not given any or adequate training for it. This commonly happens when the system is installed and later on when responsibility is ‘handed over’ (or not) to another member of staff. In my experience staff are given the most basic of instructions and rarely given guidance on how the system should perform and how to recognise if the system is not performing as it should. There is some recognition of this in parts of the energy sector and I believe things are improving. However it is vitally important that the customer ensures an installer provides adequate training to several members of staff and this is captured in user friendly guide by staff for assisting handovers. In short, I don’t think it needs to be complicated but these (and other) issues can make it very complicated.
Kristina Lomas |
Hi Gillian, I think many people can relate to what you say. Technology is changing rapidly and user expectation and experience is so important to how we feel about our environment. There are various things we can do to assist with the transition (if we feel it’s ultimately a good thing) e.g. using signs or symbols to identify where technology such as this is in place. Adjustments can be made to settings to ensure you are not finding yourself sitting in the dark and I suppose we could ask if we should be sitting still for too long anyway and is this a useful prompt to move (or just annoying). We are going through a period where advances in technology are changing the way we interact with the internal environment, so it’s really important to reflect on this when moving through change to ensure we stay connected.
Rachel Wade |
Thank you for your reply Kristina. It would be great to have a legal requirement in place so that buildings have appropriate documentation of their evolution, though there would undoubtedly be several limitations to the depth of this information. I often wonder about the former inhabitants of the building where I live – a beautiful Victorian terrace house converted in to flats – and wondered if I, now the inhabitant of the building, have a responsibility to tracing, recording and preserving the building’s history – and my impact on it.
The other questions and answers are also really interesting, so much to think about!