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The purpose of this paper is to present a methodology for estimating scheduled and manual override heating events and heating settings from indoor air temperature and gas use measurements in UK homes.

Living room air temperature and gas use data were measured in ten UK homes built to low energy standards. The temperature measurements are used to establish whether the central heating system is turned on or off and to estimate the heating setpoint used. The estimated heating periods are verified using the homes' average daily gas consumption profiles.

Using this method, the average number of heating periods per day was 2.2 (SD = 0.8) on weekdays and 2.7 (SD = 0.5) on weekends. The weekday mean heating duration was 8.8 h and for weekends, it was 9.8 h. Manual overrides of the settings occurred in all the dwellings and added an average of 2.4 h and 1.5 h to the heating duration on weekdays and weekends respectively. The mean estimated setpoint temperatures were 21.2 and 21.4°C on weekdays and weekends respectively.

Manual overrides of heating behaviours have only previously been assessed by questionnaire survey. This paper demonstrates an alternative method to identifying these manual override events and responds to a key gap in the current body of research that little is currently reported on the frequency and duration of manual heating overrides in UK homes.

The results could be used to better inform the assumptions of space heating behaviour used in energy models in order to more accurately predict the space heating energy demands of dwellings.

Manual overrides of heating behaviours have only previously been assessed by questionnaire survey. This paper demonstrates an alternative method to identifying these manual override events and responds to a key gap in the current body of research that little is currently reported on the frequency and duration of manual heating overrides in UK homes.

The purpose of this paper is to present the advantages of a solar store system with transpired solar air collector (TSC) in North Wales, UK. The collectors are designed as a proposal to meet the target of the solar air storage and heating project to improve the efficiency of solar collectors in the UK.

IES software simulation is used to examine the potential of a solar store system in Deeside Leisure Centre compared to the traditional constant air volume (CAV) system and CAV system with heat pump. The design parameters and configurations are determined on the basis of the monitoring results gained from recent experiments.

The result demonstrates good agreement between simulations and monitoring results and the solar store system demonstrates considerably lower energy consumption compared to the traditional CAV system with and without heat pump.

The usage of TSC is proven to be useful in improving COP of the heat pumps and reducing overall energy consumption in a leisure center. The framework proposed in this study could also be applied to different building types in order to highlight their advantages.

In order to succeed in an action under the Equal Pay Act 1970, should the woman and the man be employed by the same employer on like work at the same time or would the woman still be covered by the Act if she were employed on like work in succession to the man? This is the question which had to be solved in Macarthys Ltd v. Smith. Unfortunately it was not. Their Lordships interpreted the relevant section in different ways and since Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome was also subject to different interpretations, the case has been referred to the European Court of Justice.

The operational phase of a building's lifecycle is receiving increasing attention, as it consumes an enormous amount of energy and results in tremendous detrimental impacts on the environment. While energy simulation can be applied as a tool to evaluate the energy performance of a building in operation, the emergence of Building Information Modeling (BIM) technology is expected to facilitate the evaluation process with predefined and enriched building information. However, such an approach has been confronted by the challenge of interoperability issues among the related application software, including the BIM tools and energy simulation tools, and the results of simulation have been seldom verified due to the unavailability of corresponding experimental data. This study aims to explore the interoperability between the commonly used energy simulation and BIM tools and verifies the simulation approach by undertaking a case study.

With Autodesk Revit and EnergyPlus selected as the commonly used BIM and energy simulation tools, respectively, a valid technical framework of transferring building information between two tools is proposed, and the interoperability issues that occur during the data transfer are studied. The proposed framework is then employed to simulate the energy consumption of a single-family house, and sensitivity analysis and analysis on such parameters as schedule are conducted for building operations to showcase its applicability.

The simulation results are compared with monitored data and the results from another simulation tool, HOT2000; the comparison reveals that EnergyPlus and HOT2000 predict the total energy consumption with a difference from the monitoring data of 8.0 and 7.1%, respectively.

This research shows how to efficiently use BIM to support building energy simulation. Relevant stakeholders can learn from this research to avoid data loss during BIM model transformation.

This research explores the application of BIM for building energy simulation, compares the simulation results among different tools and validates simulation results using monitored data.

The question of health and safety at work is a central issue for trade unions. In Britain it is an area of concern where there were important legislative initiatives in the 1970s and 1980s, although surprisingly this has received relatively little attention in the debates about trade unionism. This neglect results in an aspect of union activity about which little is known. Explores through a detailed longitudinal study of a middle‐range engineering firm, from the late 1970s into the 1990s, the ways in which trade unions organize and act on health and safety questions. Argues that it is almost “routine” that workers face dangers and hazards at work, a central feature of the work and employment experience of most workers. However, this is often difficult to deal with as individual issues, or as matters which are subject to collective consideration. On the one hand, workers often appear to accept the dangers and hazards they face. On the other hand, managements are preoccupied with questions relating to production and finance, rather than the day‐to‐day problems faced by workers. This tension suggests that the future wellbeing of workers in unionized workplaces lies not so much with legislative provisions and rights at work, but in education and the organizing ability of workplace unions, raising and addressing what often seem like individualistic problems in collective ways.

The Equal Pay Act 1970 (which came into operation on 29 December 1975) provides for an “equality clause” to be written into all contracts of employment. S.1(2) (a) of the 1970 Act (which has been amended by the Sex Discrimination Act 1975) provides:

The Howard Shuttering Contractors case throws considerable light on the importance which the tribunals attach to warnings before dismissing an employee. In this case the tribunal took great pains to interpret the intention of the parties to the different site agreements, and it came to the conclusion that the agreed procedure was not followed. One other matter, which must be particularly noted by employers, is that where a final warning is required, this final warning must be “a warning”, and not the actual dismissal. So that where, for example, three warnings are to be given, the third must be a “warning”. It is after the employee has misconducted himself thereafter that the employer may dismiss.

There is a clear consensus that improving energy efficiency of existing housing stock is necessary to meet the UK’s legally binding carbon emission targets by 2050. The purpose of this paper is to assess the energy saving potentials from building retrofit using an end-terrace house, similar houses represent about 30 per cent of the existing building stock in the UK.

The Salford Energy House – a unique pre-1919 Victorian end-terrace house built within an environmental chamber – was used. Retrofit modelling analysis was carried out using IESVE – a dynamic thermal simulation tool. The retrofitted model was also evaluated using future projected climate data (CIBSE latest release) to examine energy demands and overheating.

Findings show that improving building fabric thermal characteristics can reduce space heating demands substantially. Heating modes, set point preferences and infiltration level all have strong impact on heating demands. Space heating demand savings can be as much as 77 per cent when the property facades were upgraded to the similar requirements of Passivhaus standards. The research implicates that, for dwelling retrofit practices, a whole house holistic approach should be the preferred option to improve energy efficiency. With future climate scenarios where temperatures are potentially elevated, the heating demands can be potentially reduced as much as 27 per cent.

The likelihood of overheating in dwellings after a deep retrofit due to future elevated temperatures becomes apparent. Therefore, mitigation of overheating risk becomes a necessity for future domestic housing stock retrofit planning and policy making.

The research presented in this paper highlights the effectiveness of various retrofit measures individually as well as holistically, also the implications on energy demands and the likelihood of overheating in dwellings under future climate scenarios.

Climate-induced damage is a pressing problem for the preservation of cultural properties. Their physical deterioration is often the cumulative effect of different environmental hazards of variable intensity. Among these, fluctuations of temperature and relative humidity may cause nonrecoverable physical changes in building envelopes and artifacts made of hygroscopic materials, such as wood. Microclimatic fluctuations may be caused by several factors, including the presence of many visitors within the historical building. Within this framework, the current work is focused on detecting events taking place in two Norwegian stave churches, by identifying the fluctuations in temperature and relative humidity caused by the presence of people attending the public events.

The identification of such fluctuations and, so, of the presence of people within the churches has been carried out through three different methods. The first is an unsupervised clustering algorithm here termed “density peak,” the second is a supervised deep learning model based on a standard convolutional neural network (CNN) and the third is a novel ad hoc engineering feature approach “unexpected mixing ratio (UMR) peak.”

While the first two methods may have some instabilities (in terms of precision, recall and normal mutual information [NMI]), the last one shows a promising performance in the detection of microclimatic fluctuations induced by the presence of visitors.

The novelty of this work stands in using both well-established and in-house ad hoc machine learning algorithms in the field of heritage science, proving that these smart approaches could be of extreme usefulness and could lead to quick data analyses, if used properly.

In this chapter the potential to use water-based Trombe walls to provide heated water for building applications during the summer months is investigated. Design Builder software is used to model a simple single-story building with a south-facing Trombe wall. The effects of using different thermal storage mediums within the Trombe wall on building heating loads during the winter and building cooling loads during the summer are modeled. The amount of thermal energy stored and temperature of water within the thermal storage medium during hot weather conditions were also simulated. On a sunny day on Toronto, Canada, the average temperature of the water in a Trombe wall integrated into a single-story building can reach ∼57°C, which is high enough to provide for the main hot water usages in buildings. Furthermore, the amount of water heated is three times greater than that required in an average household in Canada. The results from this work suggest that water-based Trombe walls have great potential to enhance the flexibility and utility of Trombe walls by providing heated water for building applications during summer months, without compromising performance during winter months.