Summarizing an abundance of factors into one: Practical implementation of energy labelling for existing buildings in Belgium

Dries Maes, Johan Desmedt, and Guy Vekemans, Vito – Flemish Institute for Technological Research
Madeleine Cantaert, University of Louvain-la-Neuve

Keywords

Abstract

In the light of the European Directive on Energy Performance of Building, Vito participated in the conception of the official method for the evaluation of energy performance of existing buildings by order of the Belgian authorities.

The present residential sector in Belgium has some very specific difficulties. Because of the high average age of the buildings and the typical personal construction culture, there is an enormous diversity of the existing houses. A labelling procedure should therefore take into account all possible aspects and construction data in order to allow a useful comparison.

41 existing houses have been evaluated with this new procedure. To ensure a thorough test, the diversity of the participating houses and installations has been chosen as large as possible. As a surplus value for the occupants of the house, the evaluation resulted in energy-saving recommendations for the building envelope, the heating installation and preparation of domestic hot water.

The results are first of all a view on the applicability of this new procedure. Despite of the difficulties of comparison at first sight, the actual results give clear indications about the performance of the house in terms of energy consumption and energy savings potential.

In order to further evaluate the procedure,, the actual implementation of the recommendations has been followed up. The procedure has been evaluated by means of questionnaires and qualitative sociological interviews. The results show important advantages and problems for future public acceptance of energy savings, once the European directives will be fully implemented.