{"id":84512,"date":"2022-10-17T15:48:08","date_gmt":"2022-10-17T19:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsroom.carleton.ca\/?post_type=cu_story&p=84512"},"modified":"2025-08-19T09:37:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T13:37:08","slug":"empty-buildings-consume-energy","status":"publish","type":"cu_story","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/story\/empty-buildings-consume-energy\/","title":{"rendered":"Empty buildings consume more energy than you think"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Empty buildings consume more energy than you think\n <\/h1>\n \n <\/header>\n <\/div>\n\n \n <\/path>\n <\/path>\n <\/svg>\n <\/div>\n\n \n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

This article is republished<\/a> from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. All photos provided by The Conversation<\/a> from various sources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Over the past few decades, the booming global population, growing cities and changing climate have brought global attention to the need to build energy-efficient and sustainable buildings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Evidence suggests that residential energy use<\/a> increased during the pandemic. But what do we know about how people impact energy use in buildings they don’t occupy? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a recent paper<\/a>, our team at the Human-Building Interaction Lab uncovered that empty buildings consume more energy than we thought<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Buildings consume more energy when empty or partially occupied for extended periods because they are designed to depend on human interactions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Empty buildings<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Our research found that empty buildings consume more energy in colder climates because the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems need to compensate for lost heat usually generated by the daily activities of people in these buildings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A<\/a>
\n An illustration of the number of occupants in a sample building during a workday.<\/span>
\n (Farzam Kharvari)<\/span>, Author provided<\/span><\/span>
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A primary reason behind the increase in energy use is static schedules that are used for designing buildings<\/a>. Static schedules provide an hourly estimate of the number of people that would occupy these buildings. While these schedules are incorporated into the building design, they do not consider the actual number of people or their movements in buildings. As a consequence, our buildings were not able to adapt to emptiness during lockdowns<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although the research on replacing static schedules with stochastic schedules \u2014 schedules that consider various factors and attributes including, but not limited to occupancy \u2014 is growing<\/a>, our research demonstrated that implementing simple strategies like installing smart technologies can help empty buildings adapt to partial occupancy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using smart technologies<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Technologies that sense the presence of people or count the number of occupants can help to mitigate the negative impacts of static schedules<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n