Setting standards

This is one of the most boring lessons in the course. Usually I would try to make it intactive by putting students into groups, telling them they are politicians, industry leaders, architects and building physicists tasked with making regulations to ensure low energy buildings are built.

Here is some information on video:

More about the lesson here:

https://minuszeroeco.blogspot.com/2015/12/lesson-8-standards.html

Lesson 10: Take 3: Standards

It's a challenge making building standards interesting. The topic seems as dry as a highly insulated house in the middle of winter with heat recovery ventilation and no humidification. As I started brushing the cobwebs off last year's presentation, my first thought was that I should teach this lesson later, and tackle the altogether more exciting topic of energy generation first. I stopped myself, thinking that I was just trying to put it off, and I've just noticed now that I'd moved it two weeks later last year. A lesson on comfort had been added to the original plan, and Windows 2.0 came after the lesson on standards the first time.

This lesson should really work as a revision of what I've been telling them about low energy building, since standards ideally reflect the essence of low energy building, and promote improvement.

I followed the plan at the beginning, giving them several reasons for low energy building. An obvious reason is to reduce environmental impact, although unfortunately this is a relatively low priority for a lot of people. Money is often a higher priority, and the fact that low energy buildings are cheaper to run, long term, is perhaps a more powerful incentive. Even then, a lot of people are concerned with the immediate costs, and less worried about possible future savings. Grants or tax breaks are another reason people may build low energy, but the most powerful reason is probably where there are laws that oblige people to build low energy.

Then I tried to introduce the idea of standards, with a few examples and their logos, including the JIS (Japan Industrial Standards) logo, which they all knew, and the logos for European Standards, British Standards, and Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC), which they did not.

In order to breathe some air into the topic, I put them into groups and had them imagine they were government committees who had to come up with their own standards to ensure low energy buildings.

First they had to brainstorm for things they could look at. I had to steer them away from things like giving grants, which is a good idea but not actually a standard.

Their ideas mentioned insulation materials, windows, form factor and solar power.

After some brainstorming, I got each group to choose two or three ideas, and come up with some details of what exactly they would stipulate.

They came up with a few concrete suggestions, such as using wood rather than aluminium for window frames, and a minimum percentage of glazing to frame. Other ideas were a bit vaguer, like making the air gap thicker, and having "really thick" walls. There were very few actual numbers, and nobody mentioned U-values, which makes me think I haven't talked about that enough times.​ Also nobody mentioned ventilation.​ One group came up with the two ideas of adding solar panels, and adding a battery to store the power. These are both interesting ideas but have absolutely nothing to do with what we've been talking about for the previous nine weeks. That did make me think I should have done the lesson on generation first.

The lack of detail also made me wonder whether I should have given them that task later in the lesson, after I had given some examples of actual building standards. As often happens in teaching, there is a difficult balance to reach between giving students information and getting them to come up with their own ideas. Perhaps I should start off by introducing some of the early low-energy building standards and then get them to think about what is missing, how they could be improved, and what they would do now.

This may have been a good lesson to produce a multi-dimensional gap fill, or jigsaw activity for. There is a smartphone app called Quizlet Live that lets you add several questions and their answers, which are then scrambled for students to match. The teacher gives students an access code, then the app puts students into groups of three or four, so they have to go and find their partners. Then each student gets around four answers on their screen, and the questions come up in turn. The student with the correct answer must select that, then they will all get the next question. If someone gives the wrong answer, it goes back to the beginning again, shuffling the answers. This may not make the content any less dry, but it could socialise its delivery.

​ ​

Why are Japan's building energy standards low and lax compared to Northern Europe?

Just looking back over some homework. After a lesson last year on building standards, including comparisons between standards in Japan and Europe, I asked my students this question: Why do you think Japan's building energy standards are low and lax compared to Northern Europe?


(The letters afterwards correspond to the nationality of students. See below for a key.)

Some of them commented on the climate, for example:

The Japanese Archipelago extends from north to south, and Japanese climate has more variety than Northern Europe. Japan region has its shape long from the North to the South, (not like Denmark, UK), It has a really cold winter like in Hokkaido, but most of the population is located in the warmer place like Tokyo, Osaka. (K, J1, V)
Northern Europe has a higher latitude than Japan. That means the winter is colder so for the very survival of the people they need to be concerned about building houses which will lose less heat. There comes the idea of low energy building. The example is same as Australia and Sweden when we compare the death rate from cold. (B)
Because, the climate change of Japan is more irregular than Northern Europe. When every season changes, temperature of Japan is changeable. (K)
There's a lot of earthquakes and typhoons in Japan. Rather than focusing on energy saving, Japanese focus more on preventing their house from getting blown away by typhoon or getting crushed by earthquake. (M)
There's a rumour in Malaysia that Japanese tend to build cheaper and simple house, so that when natural disaster comes, they won't have much loss even when their house is crushed, and they could have their house rebuilt in a shorter period. (fast, easy, and cheap) (M)

Old building ways focus on summer (even though low energy building would help them in summer too) (P)

Typical 1960's Japanese house (!)

They also commented about building industry:
The Japanese tend to treasure their own traditional buildings and they are not flexible to accept new standards. (J2)

Often demolishing old houses and building new ones instead (not enough time for payback of a more expensive to build low-energy house) (P)

And they made comments about Japanese culture:

I think that there is cultural differences. Japanese have table known as kotatsu and they love it, They usually prepare to stay in kotatsu rather than keeping the whole house warm. Therefore they aren't paying any attention towards the overall warmth of the building. (M)
Culture of shouganai [there's nothing we can do about it] and 'living with nature' (P)
They are patient to changes of season because Japanese island has basically the four seasons and it means they don't need to employ efficient standards because of their acquired patience. (J2)

They also mentioned population and technology.
Northern European specially Scandinavian countries have way less population than Japan. When you have more people, the matters you need to worry about increase by number. Also it takes time to solve them. I think that is another reason of having a less standard. (B)
Japan try to reduce a consumption of primary energy by installing housing equipment. (J3)

(B: Bangladesh; J: Japan; K: South Korea; P: Poland; V: Vietnam)

This year I just asked a multiple choice question. Fifteen students gave answers. The number of responses is in brackets.

"In your opinion, what is the biggest reason for Japan's lax low-energy building standards? (There is no correct answer. I'm just interested what you think!)"

Scandinavian countries have a similar climate, but Japan is an archipelago going from very hot places to cold places. (4)
Creating low-energy electrical appliances and products is more important for Japan's economy. (3)
Northern European buildings are built for the cold winters, but Japanese buildings are built for the hot summers. (3)
Japanese builders like traditional buildings, and they do not want to change. (1)
All of these reasons are equally important. (1)
Some other reason. (Please tell me next lesson!) (1)
Because of earthquakes and other natural disasters, Japanese people do not want to spend a lot on buildings. (0)
I don't know. (2)

Some of these answers are interrelated, so the question doesn't really lend itself to the multiple choice format. Looking back on it, the most commonly selected answer doesn't clearly answer the question. I guess the implication is that Japan's varied climate makes it difficult to set single standards. I'll have to try again next year! Perhaps they should be able to give ratings to several different reasons.

Lesson 8: Standards

There are several reasons to build a low energy building. It may save you money through cheaper bills over the lifetime of the building. It may reduce your carbon footprint and reduce damage to the environment. It may be eligible for grants or tax breaks that could make building or financing cheaper. 

Another reason, in some places, is that there are building standards that require you to build a low energy building. The earliest of these was probably the Danish BR77 standard, introduced in 1977 and obligatory a couple of years later. The 1980 Swedish SBN-80 (Svensk Bygg Norm) also set demanding energy efficiency requirements early on. Around the same time the R-2000 standard came out in Canada, although that was voluntary.

At the risk of coming out with a lesson dryer than the one on humidity, I started off putting my students into a couple of groups, telling them to imagine they were governments and getting them to come up with some standards to reduce energy use in buildings.


First they were to brainstorm a list of ideas. Later they would be able to use judgement and discussion to choose the best. They had various ideas, from banning aluminium windows and setting limits on carbon emissions to setting up bodies to reduce energy use and prohibiting air conditioners.

There are basically three different kinds of standards: prescriptive, performance based and outcomes based.

Prescriptive standards tell builders and designers what they must do, for example that walls must have U values of 0.13 W/m²K. The advantage of prescriptive standards is that they are clear and definitive. The disadvantage is that they may may be too conservative, leading to buildings that are over-engineered, or they may not take into account how prescribed building elements are used, for example the orientation of the windows.

Performance-based standards require calculations to predict how much energy a building will use. For example heating energy of less than 15 kWh/m²a. This gives designers more freedom in how to use building elements in optimal ways, and to make sensible compromises with the over picture in mind. They do mean that designers have to make those calculations. Performance-based standards may also help in the introduction and use of non-traditional features and techniques.

Outcome-based codes mean that the actual performance of buildings is measured and reported, to ensure that standards have been met. If it turns out they don't, it's too late!

I gave a brief history of building standards around the world, starting in the 1970's. I briefly mentioned the US's flirtation with energy conservation in that short era of energy democracy, before the energy republic of Reagan took over.

The main story was in Denmark and Sweden, where standards in 1980 were only reached in the UK in 2006. Meanwhile over here in Japan, the standards today in Matsumoto are roughly equivalent to those in 1985 in the UK.

Of course it is very difficult to compare building standards in different countries, and normalising for weather is one issue. Another is how many buildings comply to the standards. Not only are Japan's standards something like thirty years behind the UK and fifty years behind Sweden, they are also applied to well under half of newly built small homes.

Here are some links if you want to read more:
Global energy efficiency measures could save €410 billion by 2030
Map of global standards

WPBG Energy Codes

Country report on Japan

PNL Report from April 2009 

EU report on Japan

More shelves

We have rather a lot of shelves in the house, but apparently not enough. In many places we have metal rails up each side, so the shelves can be moved up and down and added to.

In a couple of places we may have too many shelves, but that is not such a serious problem any more. One problem is that each shelf alcove is a different width, so we can't simply move a shelf from where there are too many to where there are not enough, and we couldn't have ordered an extra few shelves from the carpenter, in the knowledge that we would certainly need shelves, since we were uncertain exactly where we would need them.

In one place, above the laundry shoot in the bathroom upstairs, we have extra shelves since we changed our minds about the colour. In most places we have two colours: white and dark brown. Our original order was for white shelves but we later revised it to brown since the shelves were liable to get dirty and white would show this dirt much better. In the meantime the first shelves had already been painted, so we got another three.  And those three shelves have been waiting for something to happen. Specifically, waiting for us to get the small brackets that slot into the metal rails running up and down each side. The site foreman showed us where we could get them the last time he visited, which is a few months back now. It's not particularly far away, but not somewhere we usually pass, except on weekends, and then it's closed.

We made it today and the shop, Okano, is a real treasure trove of building stuff, with whole rows of drill bits, and rooms full of aluminium rods. It's the kind of place that would sell left-handed screwdrivers and bottomless buckets of sparks. They had the brackets and asked how many I wanted. I asked how many were in a box, assuming they would be cheaper that way. There were 200 in a box, and they cost 68 yen each. This seemed a lot for a little bit of metal with some rubber on it, until I got back and tried to find it on the internet, armed as I now was with a part number from the receipt. The cheapest I could find them on the internet was 84 yen, so in this case the bricks and mortar shop with the friendly people worked out cheaper. I bought fifty brackets off them, so since there are four brackets to each shelf and when I can find the other one that's left in a safe place in the house, we'll be able to put up 13 more shelves.

So next we went to the DIY shop looking at bits of wood we could use for more shelving, and were quite shocked how cheap it all was. Several pieces were available off the peg in shelf-like shapes and sizes. Actually they were often on shelves.

I'm sure with a little bit of effort all the shelves in our house could have been designed in these predetermined widths and saved the carpenter a lot of work and materials, and knocked thousands of yen off our bill.