Benefits of refurbishment

Energy and environmental performances of buildings strictly depend on many factors related to the choice of construction materials, HVAC plants and equipment, design, installation and use. By definition, a building interacts closely with its environment. The interactions between building and climate, plants and users have to be taken into account. This aspect is evident in new buildings design process, but it is even more important in the design phase of an existing building renovation, during which actions of energy saving are developed. This chapter summarises the results of the energy and environmental assessment of a set of retrofit actions implemented in the framework of the EU Project “BRITA in PuBs”. The main goals were to improve building energy and environmental performances following a life-cycle approach and support, and to support the project partners to select the retrofit actions involving the highest energy saving and the lowest environmental impacts. Synthetic indices, as energy and GWP payback times, and energy return ratio, are defined to better describe the energy and environmental performances of the actions. The use of the life-cycle approach was very successful and potentially transferable to other contexts of building retrofit study