Week 2 Down to business
Our second week at SBE has already come to end; time is flying by so fast… It has been an exciting and busy week, to say the least. This week we had a more hands on approach to learning, beginning with projects then learning the skills we need to complete them. We were assigned two town planning projects; a class 3 student housing and a class 1a multi-dwelling (townhouse) development.
Our week began with battling over gets to use the single software license for daylight modelling within IES VE. While we had access Sean taught us the basics and we were able to investigate the daylighting performance impacts of variables such as window placement, orientation, material properties and shade.
The student housing project terrifies both of us so we decided to pick our battles and start with the townhouse project. We conducted First Rate 5 energy assessments on the dwellings and we were both pleased and relieved to reach the minimum NatHERS star rating requirement for the project. With balancing heating and cooling demand along with insights from Rob regarding placement and types of insulation we were able to achieve a 6.6 star rating.
To complete this planning project we also needed to complete a Built Environment Sustainability Scorecard (BESS) to comply with council level regulations. BESS assesses ESD performance under nine key criteria (Energy, Indoor Environment Quality (IEQ), Water, Stormwater, Management, Urban Ecology, Transport, Waste and Innovation). For the BESS assessment we needed to provide our NatHERS ratings, calculate a ‘STORM Score’ with the Melbourne Water STORM tool and collect/ provide all relevant data. With a passing BESS we were then able to complete our first report ready for clients.
The NCC class 3 student housing facility has different requirements to the smaller scale residential projects we have completed thus far. We are currently trying flesh out the skills we need for this project, such as daylight modelling and studying the National Construction Code so we are ready to learn JV3 modelling. With these skills hopefully we are ready to take on the student housing project.
More to come…