Beyond expensive building and equipment upgrades and retrofits, re-commissioning (analogous to performing a comprehensive tune-up on your car) and automated fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) for building systems offer significant energy efficiency opportunities in commercial buildings.

Radiant cooling and heating has the potential for improved energy efficiency, demand response, comfort, indoor environmental quality, and architectural design. Many radiant buildings have demonstrated outstanding performance in these regards, and application of the technology in commercial buildings is expanding.

Australia’s homes are notoriously “leaky” – allowing the uncontrolled flow of heat into and out of the building. Our answer has been to put in more and more pumps, in the form of air conditioning. This is often promoted as a feature, rather than an indication of a poor-quality building! This creates problems for everyone...

This paper provides a snapshot of future HVAC in a net-zero world, and outlines some of the mainthemes from the workshop discussions such as:

Purpose / Context - This paper will examine the predicted energy consumption (MJ/m2) of a resi-dential house made of rammed earth in sub-tropical, tropical and temperate climates of Australia using design data of the building fabric and glazing. Methodology - To improve energy performance of this building project, thermal simulation and comprehensive simulated data analysis...