Building performance optimisation for the retrofit of a council tower block in London

This study aims to optimise the building performance of a 22-storey tower block in London Borough of Newham (LBN) using energy efficient retrofitting strategies. Initial studies show that the water ingress issues within the tower block are mainly caused by a combination of inefficient building envelope and occupants' patterns of energy consumption in their homes. The first phase of this research analysed the performance of the tower block through indoor monitoring, occupants' interviews and building simulation in the winter season. The second phase of this project, the focus of this paper, studies two retrofit approaches of the tower block by applying EnerPHit standard, and the potential retrofit approach considered by LBN. The study builds on the results from the first phase by using building simulation to examine the reduction of heating loads and the improvement of indoor thermal comfort in the winter season when applying each retrofit strategy. The results showthat improving the building envelope by using EnerPHit standard through significant improvement of the building fabric and incorporating Mechanical Ventilation and Heat Recovery (MVHR) systems, decrease the building heating energy loads to more than half of the actual energy consumption while keeping the indoor thermal environment within the standard comfort range. In addition, using LBN suggested thermal insulation material as the potential retrofitting strategy to improve the External Wall Insulation (EWI), reduces the energy consumption of the building to nearly half of the original heating energy loads, nearly similar to the first retrofitting approach in this study