Analysis of lifetimes of building elements in the literature and in renovation practices and sensitivity analysis on building LCA & LCC

In this study, the service lives of the building elements, an important parameter in renovations and LCA/LCC calculations, are analyzed, based on a comprehensive literature review and a survey of Swiss households. The literature review showed that there is no consensus about the service lives, among the different countries, while the results of the survey on the renovation timing of the building elements, showed on average an agreement between the element’s effective lifetime and the average from the literature data. In addition, based on the literature data, lognormal distributions were defined for the service life of the building elements and then the probabilistic LCA & LCC were calculated. The results showed that the uncertainty of 6 building elements’ service lives can significantly influence the reliability of the results. For the practitioners, the study confirms that the current practice of using service life data of the SIA 2032 technical books, for building LCA and LCC, constitutes a relative good estimation of the most probable value of the probabilistic LCA