SQUARE – A System for Quality Assurance when Retrofitting Existing Buildings to Energy Efficient Buildings

Energy use in and by a building has the most important environmental impact during the building’s life, and is therefore the most important to reduce. The energy consumption of a building depends both on the building envelope and on the building services systems which, in their turn, affect the indoor environment.

If we are to achieve significant reductions of energy use in existing buildings, it is important to perform future large-scale retrofitting of buildings in a systematic and controlled manner. When retrofitting a building many aspects must be taken into account, such as local resources, costs, building traditions, legislation and financing.

One example of such a quality assurance system is a system for indoor environment quality assurance that has been developed in Sweden and successfully applied in a number of buildings over the last ten years. This QA system had been extended to include energy use and was then applied in retrofitting of buildings in different European countries.

The SQUARE project aimed to promote energy-efficient retrofitting with improved indoor environment in social housing by using the QA system adopted for each country with their quite different climatic and sociological conditions. An important task was to use the QA system in pilot projects in order to spread information and the methodology in European countries through practical experience and good examples.