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JANUARY 09 - SHOWCASING LOW CARBON ‘BEST PRACTICE’- NATURALLY



Low energy ventilation and light solutions are helping a £3.2m low carbon exemplar showcase tangibly demonstrate sustainable solutions for the building industry.

The Wolseley Sustainable Building Center, strategically located on a brownfield site in the centre of the UK at Royal Leamington Spa, has already been accepted as a Demonstration Project by the Building & Estates Forum, as a vehicle for dissemination of ‘best practice’ knowledge for the built environment. Key elements of the building services- the ventilation and lighting- both use little or no energy to function, thanks to strategies developed by Passivent, and Glidevale, both part of the Building Product Design Group.

Just two Passivent Airscoops and two Passivent Aircools combined with automatic opening windows ensure the main gallery is efficiently ventilated 24/7, whilst Glidevale Sunscoop tubular rooflights optimise natural daylight into the deep plan ground floor office and seminar spaces.

Passivent worked closely with architects ECD to develop the ventilation strategy for the Center. As a result, the Airscoops are positioned above the first floor gallery, providing displacement ventilation using only natural air movement. Each Airscoop is divided into four internal chambers, allowing fresh air to channel down the windward chamber(s) and exhaust through the leeward chambers from the suction effect created as the wind passes over the roof terminal.

In the ground floor gallery, Passivent Window Aircool units are used to draw fresh air in from outside. The internal used and warm air rises via natural convection and is exhausted through high level automatic opening windows.

A digital controller from Passivent’s range of Intelligent Controllers monitors the temperature inside and outside the space, attenuating the Aircool louvres to increase or decrease air flow as required. The system is configured to function 24/7, enabling ‘free’ night cooling when the Center is unoccupied.

The ground floor office and seminar spaces further benefit from natural resource via 2 x 530mm Glidevale Sunscoop tubular rooflights in the theatre, and a further 4 x 250mm Sunscoops in the seminar/ meeting area. Clear glazed domes on the roof ‘trap’ natural light and reflect it down silvered tubes through the roof space to the deep plan areas below. Even the smallest 250mm diameter 2.5m long Sunscoop gives up to four times more light than a single 60W bulb*.

Automatic light dampers have been included in the A/V theatre Sunscoops, to dim the light down to black-out during presentations: the dampers are the only element to use electricity.

Mark Elton, Associate Director of ECD Architects (energy conscious design), observed, “Our brief for the building as a whole was to create a low carbon exemplar showcase for Wolseley’s sustainable product range. It is a unique feature of the Center that the products incorporated are available through Wolseley: as a direct result of the project, new suppliers were introduced to Wolseley.”

Wolseley’s Tim Pollard adds, “We believe these products will become the de facto standard to meet the evolving legislative, regulatory and environmental standards. Increasingly, issues such as fuel costs, addressing waste and resource depletion are driving the sustainability agenda into practical reality. The Center enables the industry to see, touch and experience the products in a real working environment and access them through a sophisticated supply chain.”

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