Other sectors have grasped the opportunities and challenges faced by e-commerce in different ways and with different levels of success, but it’s now an unavoidable feature of daily life for most businesses and individuals.

The principal MEPchallenge here is catering for the air change requirements, which are clearly much higher in a laboratory than in an office.Doing this has been greatly helped by the 3D modelling that was carried out on the original project.. HVAC upgrades at the Portway.

Also on the Granta Park is a building called Portway.Initially built as a large office complex for one company, we have been working on dividing it up to house nine separate clients.This has complex implications for mechanical and electrical services.

For obvious technical reasons, each client cannot be serviced separately, so each one has to be monitored separately for energy, airflow and water usage..The existing plant was 20 years old, and at the end of its useful life.

But you can’t simply replace an old plant with a new one – mechanical and electrical engineering machines are so much more advanced and efficient now so some take up less space, but others are larger due to the need to reduce energy (for example, air-handling units).

We have taken the opportunity to reconfigure the building to some extent.Comparison of embodied carbon (A-C) between a baseline residential building based on LETI Band C and same building with Passivhaus characteristics.

The adoption of the above Passivhaus standard does not have a substantial impact on the embodied carbon compared to a standard residential building.The adoption of Passivhaus does not prevent the incorporation of additional strategies to reduce embodied carbon and all designs retain the potential to achieve low embodied carbon performance if it is part of the design intent.. Further potential benefits from Passivhaus arise from the compact shape and the use of timber, although full life cycle analysis is required to quantify this.

The compact shape is predicted to reduce the absolute quantity of materials whilst timber is a material with low embodied carbon which can be ultra-low depending on its end-of-life treatment..Timber shows its maximum potential if it can be continuously reused at the end of a buildings’ lifecycle.