Energy Use in Day Care Centers and Schools

Typically the aim in the construction process is to calculate the energy, space and cost efficiency in the design phase. These factors' influence on decision making extends to the whole building process. How these decisions affect the use of the building and user satisfaction as well as maintenance is still not that well understood. This study analyses different schools and day care centers and their energy as well as primary energy use. The buildings are located in southern Finland. Each building has had different objectives with respect to energy efficiency in the design phase. Our objective was to find out how those decisions made in the design and construction phase have influenced the overall energy performance of the building compared to existing building stock of similar building type. The results show that the studied buildings had lower thermal energy consumption compared to existing building stock. Thus the special attention in the design phase allowed achieving the desired goal. However, for the electricity consumption such a correlation could not be found. One of the reasons could be also different service level of buildings (more equipment). Also other quality values could not be compared since such data were not available from the existing building stock. As many earlier studies have indicated users have a high influence on the energy consumption. In the future, when feed-back from the users are obtained it will be interesting to analyze the results and compare what kind of influence that user behavior will have on the overall energy consumption of the studied buildings.