Overall Evaluation of Indoor Climate and Energy for Alternative Office Designs Using the Eco-factor

To facilitate the decision‐making and communication, an evaluation method has been devised that incorporates environmental effects of the energy use with thermal and atmospheric indoor climate in a score on an absolute scale from 0–100 %, called the “Eco‐factor”. This factor is based on indicators of physical properties. For the indoor climate part these include mainly the indoor temperature, velocity, and concentration fields. The energy part considers the energy distributed to energy sources, and the environmental effects of the resulting airborne emissions evaluated by Life Cycle Assessment (given by default figures from a database). The tool is used to make an overall assessment of the quality of design alternatives, where the “costs” (energy) is compared to the “benefit” (indoor climate), and to identify possibilities for improvement. The paper shows a model case study of an office building, where choices are considered that must be made in an early design phase.