Designing a building for style and energy efficiency is far better than designing a building for style/function and then upgrading it to become more energy efficient. The reason for this is because larger companies often have a hard time making energy efficient changes. This is often because it requires a high amount of collaboration between different people and departments, and it is often because changes on micro-levels are harder to regulate, stimulate and/or control. Designing with a view to energy efficiency gives a building and its occupants the best possible start. EPC For You in London are able to help through this process and let you know what you can do to be more energy efficient.
Heat Reflecting Glass
Some call it “Low-E Glass” and/or “Low-emissivity Glass,” and it is a form of energy efficient glass that helps save on both your heating bills and your air conditioning bills.
Plenty of glass always looks stylish, but it is not the most energy efficient building material. That is why triple-glazed low-E glass is so popular, especially with larger buildings where triple glazing is already required as a safety feature because the building is so high up.
If it is a hot day outside, then the glass keeps the hot air outside while letting the light into the building. When it is nighttime or cold outside, then the glass keeps any heated air in the building.
Isolated Storage Rooms
One of the lesser-addressed problems that buildings face is that of storage. Keeping a storage room at a comfortable temperature may be costly over an entire year, and there are always worries about dehumidifying and even about cooling depending on the types of things being stored.
Connecting the same industrial air conditioning system that you use around your office will be very expensive because it will cost money while benefiting very few people. Plus, many storage items will absorb heat, which means heating the storage room may be very difficult, not to mention the fact that high ceilings may make the room feel very cold on the floor.
One solution is to design a building that isolates its storage rooms from the rest of the building. Not only is this done on structural level, but also on a basic design level. For example, you may have a solid roof on your offices whereas you have a glass roof in your storage area.
Plus, in a storage room, you may set up very small and isolated dehumidifiers and isolated space-heaters using oil radiators for maximum energy savings. These small steps would fail to keep an office warm and dry but would work wonders for cold and humidity levels in a storage room.
Kitchens and Machinery
A very clever designer may be able to harvest heat from kitchens and machinery in order to heat the rest of a building. There are even Bitcoin miners who are drawing hot air from their miners and servers and are piping it around their buildings. What’s more, you may design your rooms around the ventilation system so that any intrusive areas are covered and/or are covered to look like design flourishes.
If you are looking to build data centers or mining centers, then consider bringing air from cold areas outdoors and then running the heated air through your building before dumping the air back outside.
Your Roof and Your Toilets
Express your design skills with a fancy roof and set up a water retrieval system either on the roof or via the drain pipes running down the side of your building. If you set it up on the roof, then you need not pump the water down into your bathroom/toilet systems.
Flushing toilets with rainwater may not seem sanitary but setting up small UV lights in the water reservoirs will help keep it safe, and some companies drop chemical cleaners into their toilet water tanks to take care of any microorganisms.
Pump rainwater that you collect from your drain pipes, and you may use the water for cooling purposes, or you may draw it into a self-regulating storage tank that draws water from mains piping if there is not enough rainwater to cover what is needed in the toilets. As mentioned in the introduction, it is far easier to set these types of innovative systems up during the building design phase rather than trying to install the system into the building after it has been built.
You’ll need to get energy ratings through the process of designing your building. Whether you need a Domestic EPC certificate or are designing a public building and need a Display Energy Certificate. Contact our EPC For You in Glasgow or EPC For You in London pages for help.