Hi, I'm a Part III student looking into the various Environmental Assessment Methods and Tools that are available to us either to help develop our schemes or to rate the performance of finished buildings. These might be systems such as BREEAM (Ecohomes etc.) and SAP but could also include software tools such as EcoTect. There's plenty of info out there explaining what these methods are for and how they work, but I'm struggling to find feedback from people that actually use them on a day-to-day basis. The floor is open!

What are your experiences of these assessment methods? Do you find them to be an invaluable element of the design process or are there shortcomings that leave you wondering if they are actually worthwhile? Is the Government backing the most suitable methods? What is the evidence that the buildings that perform well on these test are actually performing well in reality?

It would be excellent if anyone knows of any publications that have undertaken balanced but crtical analyses of these systems.

Anything at all that springs to mind will be well received. Many thanks!

Hi Keith

Many thanks for that lead, it sounds very helpful indeed. I have ordered it in order to look into it further.

CAT have just done a small feature in their Clean slate magazine, mainly on AECB's scheme and Ecohomes.

Also, it is interesting to note that the UKGBC, which BRE played lead role establishing, have chosen BRE's BREEAM and Ecohomes as their assessment tools of preference. What a surprise. This major decision was done and dusted as top priority about two days after establishment of the group. Why was this done in such a hurry? Perhaps before they had any membership who might have wanted to vote on it!

Breaks the GBC tradition somewhat, as I think all the other GBC's across the globe have adopted LEED. Personally I would have recommended the AECB's Carbonlite or Passivhaus.