News

A joint seminar was held on Tuesday 11^th October between Cotswold District Council and the Chartered Institute of Building. Organised by Richard Jones it brought together some well known local agents and a few new faces from various CIOB groups within the region. The event was kick-started by Matt Torjussen of LABC Acoustics who looked at how buildings fail and the importance of following the guidelines set out in the Building Regulations Part E and Robust details. Airborne sounds such as speech, music etc are measured by the sound pressure levels in decibels and the bigger the number the better the result. It is the opposite for impact noise on floors to detect furniture, human etc sounds where the absolute sound pressure is recorded and the higher the number the better the result. Matt believes that quite often designers look at sound following a direct path and miss out on flanking issues and normally it is down to bad design and/or bad building quality.

Dr. Gavin Dunn from Elmhurst Energy (LABC Partner) then gave a talk on calculating flexible design for Part L 2010 and SAP. It started with a general overview of how Part L has changed between 2006 and 2010 with an emphasis on reducing the whole building carbon dioxide target (DER>=TER) which is calculated using SAP 2009 software. Until 2010 Party Walls had not been subject to u-value calculations, however research showed that they contributed to heat loss when un-insulated so a value is now required in the software. It was then recommended to follow the advice given by Robust Details as these have been shown to comply with both Part L and Part E.

Overall the event was well received and will hopefully pave the way for future events between the two organisations.