Beca office receives 5.5 star NABERSNZ energy rating

Beca’s Wellington office, Aorangi House, has been awarded a 5.5 Star NABERSNZ certified base building rating by the New Zealand Green Building Council. Hot on the heels of 33 Customhouse Quay, a Beca project that achieved a 6 Star NABERSNZ rating last month, Aorangi House is one of the most energy efficient buildings in New Zealand, using around 64% less energy than a typical commercial office.

The building achieved a 5 star rating in 2016, and has achieved the additional half star rating by tuning the building. Building tuning optimises the operation of the existing building services to reduce energy use, in this case by another 20%.  Energy efficiency specialist Shaan Cory from Beca led the programme. “Building tuning can be the most cost effective way to improve the energy performance of existing buildings,” he said, “Making the best use of what is already there is the smartest thing to do first, rather than investing in solar power or new air conditioning systems for example. The cost of making changes to the controls are typically paid back within a year through energy cost reductions.”

New buildings can also benefit from building tuning during the first years of operation by ensuring the building controls are operating efficiently and correctly. Shaan has developed Beca’s own in-house building tuning service called “B-tune”. The service utilises smart technology to continuously analyse masses of system performance data and automatically detect inefficient operation over the life of a building.

Image courtesy of Studio Pacific Architecture.