Retrofitting of fire stations in cold climate regions

Abstract

Most of the urban housing stock in European cities consists of multi apartment buildings. Improvement of energy efficiency of the existing building stock is the key priority across the world. As such, unclassified buildings including fire stations present a significant potential for application of innovative energy efficient measures. Despite the fact that fire stations account for a rather insignificant share on the scale of the total building stock, it is vitally important to ensure optimal thermal comfort as well as reduce energy consumption in those buildings. This in turn contributes in minimizing maintenance and running costs for municipalities. This paper analyses typology of Latvian fire stations and their energy consumption. Standardized IFC model was developed to evaluate effect of implementation of energy efficiency measures in a selected fire station. The study results showed that the proposed theoretical thermal energy consumption of developed standardised model correlates with the measured data. The measured average annual energy consumption including electricity for fire stations was 317 kWh/m2 and thermal energy for space heating – 135.4 kWh/m2. Based on theoretical model, different retrofitting scenarios were evaluated using IDA–ICE dynamic energy simulation software. The results of this study can be expanded and applied to other types of unclassified buildings (in countries with cold climate) such as police departments and prisons.

Keywords

• buildings
• energy efficiency
• energy retrofit