CONCLUSIONS
Conclusions | Recommendations
Conclusions
Home entertainment equipment has a potential impact on the built environment as it has been shown in our results analysis. It influences the energy performance of the building in terms of overall energy demand, thermal comfort and CO2 emissions. Even though the emission levels associated with the home equipment are relatively small for a single flat, they can be catastrophically huge when considered for a whole community or a whole city, leading to an increase in the overall carbon footprint with the resulting environmental effects.
In this study a flat was considered for analyzing the impact of home entertainment equipment, however, the results can be considered suggestive for other types of housing, dwellings with lower insulation levels and also for the commercial built environment.
The results shown are highly depending on the geographical location chosen. And hence, the impact of home entertainment equipment would be even more significant in southern countries where higher summer ambient temperatures are reached, especially in the cooling requirements of the buildings.
These cooling loads are actually leading to massive blackouts in countries such as Spain or Italy, so the importance of taking a rational usage of the devices in order to curb these energy demands is crucial.
Our project sheds light on the issue in order to promote research in this area and future work focussed on detail studies of the cumulative effect of current insulation levels and heat gains from equipment.
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Recommendations
There is the need of educating people on the issue of energy savings, because in a broad sense, energy saved is energy generated.
People should be concerned on the importance of considering energy efficiency when acquiring new products, so not only a behaviour change would be achieved but also a technology change, making manufactures be more committed with energy efficiency issues.
Manufacturers of home entertainment equipment could introduce anti-standby devices in new technologies and develop a more effective energy efficiency labelling.
Suggest the inclusion of CO2 from home entertainment equipment when calculating target emission rates in the next revision of the building regulations.
Obviously, home equipment is only going to grow big both in terms of number and energy consumption, so all these issues do need consideration in order to achieve more sustainable conditions within the built environment.
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