Drawing on four years of onsite research, we’ve developed a practical, affordable and effective approach to ensuring that ‘as built’ matches ‘as designed.’ BEPIT combines detailed but easily understood learning materials with in-depth facilitation by an expert through each stage of your housebuilding project – design, procurement and construction.
In the course of our research we found that the performance gap consists of multiple, minor, and frequently occurring issues spread throughout most elements of a building.
But tackling these issues individually brings little return on investment, while approaches that try to deal with the whole problem in a single, central workshop rarely get the commitment needed to achieve long-term change.
Our approach involves no additional work for the team, but builds confidence, problem-solving, communication and technical skills – all of which can be carried forward into your next job.
Our BEPIT approach helps you:
Through our research we developed a set of seven clusters of performance-critical issues to focus on.
We help you mitigate against these issues proactively at each stage of your project: design, procurement and construction.
Get up-front buy-in from developer and project teams - making sure the message comes from the top is key to creating culture change.
We enable teams to collaborate and communicate with each other to solve minor problems before they turn into major headaches. Through a combination of focused meetings using our toolkit to educate and help communicate about issues and solutions, we work together with the lead contractor and subcontractors to beat the performance gap on your project.
Bioregional led a four year, £1.3 m action research project into the performance gap for new homes using the first part of A2Dominion’s Elmsbrook development at NW Bicester as a living laboratory. We provided a dedicated, on-site research engineer.
We carried out the research in partnership with housing provider and developer A2Dominion, Wilmott Dixon Energy Services, Loughborough University’s School of Civil and Building Engineering, PRP Architects and development and construction consultants Silver. The project was funded by Innovate UK, the government’s innovation agency.
The BEPIT project analysed design, procurement and construction processes for energy-efficient new homes in great detail . Using process mapping, monitoring and testing, we gained an in-depth, all round understanding of how new homes are built in the real world, what parts of the process impact most on their performance and what can go wrong.
After four years in a hard hat and high-vis jacket on a major construction project, our resident ‘energy performance gap guru’ Douglas Drewniak shares his ten top tips on closing the gap between building design and performance
First ‘real world’ test results for a new toolkit for housebuilders show that it can achieve major improvements in tackling the energy performance gap in new homes