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Featured Article
EnerPHit |
While the principles of low energy building apply equally for new build and upgrades, the reality is that htting passive levels becomes much trickier when retrofitting. The Passive House Institute have taken this on board and created a retrofit standard that is ambitious but achievable.
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Official magazine of Easca
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Train drivers building gets sustainability on track |
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Wednesday, 01 February 2012 |
Page 1 of 3
Built on stilts, entirely encased in recycled newspaper insulation on all sides, and designed to be easily taken apart so that its constituent elements can be reused once it reaches its end of life, Portlaoise Locomotive Drivers Building could hardly be more green. But it is – it’s a certified passive house. Iarnród Éireann senior architect David Hughes explains how such a sustainable exemplar came to be.
Train travel is the most sustainable form of vehicular transport. When a project came up to provide new accommodation for the very drivers of the greenest form of transport, it seemed a natural choice to design the building to the highest standards of energy efficiency and sustainability.
The passive house standard was chosen as the low energy approach, making this the first passive house building for any railway company in the world.
In achieving this, Iarnród Éireann is showing leadership and commitment to up-skilling all who contribute to the procurement of cutting edge low energy and sustainable buildings, ensuring that these skills find a place in the Irish construction industry as a whole.
The design was produced by Iarnród Éireann’s own architecture and structures section. Designing in house ensures that the experience gained in completing this building can be leveraged into other projects in the future, thus building on each experience from one project to the next.
The architectural design of the building was deliberately minimal,” writes architect David Hughes. “Just as the passive house concept emphasises passive (in other words hidden) principles first, so this building does not wear its green credentials on its sleeve.”
Building programme
The building’s programme and 24 hour use pattern suited the passive house concept particularly well. The building is 200 square metres and consists of changing rooms with showers, toilets, a manager’s office, an administrative office and a large open plan driver’s rest area.
It was felt that a passive house building would provide a high degree of comfort and a very healthy environment for the drivers.
Sustainability
Iarnród Éireann have been looking at a number of ultra low energy designs since 2006. In exploring the issues of sustainable design it was clear that targets like zero energy and zero carbon in terms of the building’s operation was becoming more achievable. But truly sustainable design encompasses more than just the energy used by the finished building, taking in the energy and carbon embodied in the materials themselves, and ideally designing for deconstruction, so that when the building reaches its end of life its constituent parts can be salvaged and resold, replacing a disposal cost with a saleable asset.
The building’s largest energy demand is for hot water for the changing room showers, and this is met largely by a 11 square metre Kingspan Thermomax evacuated tube solar array that’s hooked up to a 500 litre tank
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