Benefits of Refurbishment - Nearly Zero Energy Building Refurbishment - page 104

• Designs, including the description of construction materials, plants, energy-
efficient components and technologies to exploit renewable energy sources.
• Checklists and questionnaires for a data survey during the construction and
implementation of the retrofits, including also data regarding waste production
and energy consumption of construction machinery.
• Monitoring data on the energy consumption of buildings and the energy pro-
duction energy systems.
Retrofit actions are likely to be conceptually complex, because they include
other concepts, such as economic and aesthetic considerations, besides the energy
and environmental aspects. The final choices depend on a variety of environmental
technological and economic mechanisms. Therefore, a preliminary list of the
foreseeable consequences that are potentially important for the energy and envi-
ronment, due to the retrofit actions, was prepared. Afterwards, the potential key-
issues enclosed in the list were discussed with a network of experts involved in the
project. A combination of experts was selected from the group of participants to
complete questionnaires on numerical data and qualitative judgements. Ques-
tionnaires were provided to the project participants to collect data regarding both
the design stage and the implementation of the retrofit actions.
In particular, the requested information concerned the following categories:
• building materials used for the retrofit work, with particular attention to their
thermal properties
• window typologies and characteristics,
• lighting equipment,
• innovative and traditional heating systems,
• PV and solar thermal collectors,
• ventilation systems,
• pipes and ducts,
• energy consumption of machinery used during retrofit work,
• waste produced during construction.
Table 1 shows the direct energy consumption in the case studies, before the
retrofit actions, and the direct energy savings by renovating the building compo-
nents, materials and technologies; these data were collected among the project
partners by means of questionnaires. The greatest difficulties concerned the
availability of inventory data. Because a detailed analysis of each construction
component was beyond the goals of the project, national and international envi-
ronmental databases were investigated to select representative eco-profiles of
products and systems [23, 24, 25, 26, 27]. Data were deduced from references and
adapted to the specific retrofit context when not available.
A relevant issue was the service life of each retrofit component, which were
taken from the technical reports of the suppliers (Table 2 ).