Inkling at CIBSE Technical Symposium 2018

Susie represented Inkling at this years Symposium, and as had become traditional, has written up her notes, thoughts and tweets from the event. With the demise of Storify we have moved to Wakelet – here’s the link to the full story: http://wke.lt/w/s/OA0GS

If you don’t have time for the whole thing – this is the overview:

The Symposium ran over two days. It was often split into 3 simultaneous sessions so delegates have to plan their days to be in the right rooms for the sessions they want to see. This is generally useful as you can curate your experience, and swapping between rooms is allowed; but there are inevitably moments when you want to be in two places at once.

I have used tweets sent during the event, with added comments and links, to give soundbites for the sessions I attended and found interesting below, and I have summarised my overall impressions at the top here.

There was a recurring theme of disruptive technologies (lots of mobile phone references) or disruptive changes to energy markets. No consensus emerged on what the outcome of these changes will be – just that there will definitely be change.

There were some excellent presentations on building physics topics that are outside my area including modelling:

• Reflected heat from glazed facades
• Stack effects in tall buildings
• Plant metabolism in underground growing chambers
• HVAC auditing

There was also the usual mix of

• Case studies demonstrating that the performance gap is still alive and kicking
• Suggestions for how we should streamline the design process and make it more customer focussed
• Calls for more collaboration/sharing of knowledge and resources

Mike Page who is an engineer turned cognitive psychologist talked about the Cube project which has put together prototype compact, comfortable, eco-friendly dwellings. He talked us through his vision for Greentowns featuring thousands of these units, and posed the question: In the face of the housing crisis, climate change commitments and generation rent why aren’t we getting on with building these? Really – why?

One paper turned out to be a bit of a cliff-hanger as they are still at the beginning of research and don’t have outcomes/findings yet. It was presented by Ben Roberts from Loughborough who has managed to set up a pair of identical semi-detached houses as a test rig. They were university owned and have been maintained exactly the same since they were built in the 30’s. He has created virtual occupants that simulate TM59 gain patterns with controlled actuators opening internal doors and windows, and heat emitters producing the specified watts in each room for each hour. He’s filled the houses with sensors and has now finished sensitivity testing, and next plans to use the twin houses to test the effectiveness of different overheating mitigation measures this summer.

Speaking to him afterwards we’re hoping to be able to do some dynamic thermal modelling alongside this research to see how well the models predict the outcomes.