Building information#
We provide a survey form you can use to record information about the building. It has four sections: windows and ventilation, construction and insulation, heating, and other electrics.
It has two purposes: to help you think about what actions are important, and to make something you can pass to professionals and grant funders that will help them be certain they’re helping you do the right thing.
Session 2 includes a site survey activity, but the time for it isn’t sufficient in most buildings to do more than prepare people to start thinking about actions so they can play the action card game. Groups handle this problem in different ways:
Some split into pairs to tackle different sections.
Some use the activity to tackle just one major space.
Some just take quick notes and fill in details later.
Some have good documentation for their buildings and ask someone to fill in what they can from that before using the survey activity to fill in some gaps and get the group thinking about the building.
Some send a couple of people around before session to perform the survey and then explain what they saw during the session. This is a good approach for buildings that are so busy or so cold that sessions must be held eleshere.
Whatever you do, make sure that before the card game, everyone in the group has a rough idea of what is known about the building. If only a few people do, the others will feel excluded from the game and won’t speak even when their input is useful. Pictures really help for this if the group isn’t meeting in the space because it’s easy for people to get confused about which room is which.
Here are some places where you may find your organisation already has some of the information on the form:
The original architect’s drawing and other documentation from when it was built. Even some Victorian buildings have this in their archives. However, be aware that builders very often didn’t follow the plans; in particular, many modern buildings especially from the 1990’s until very recently are missing the insulation specified because it didn’t arrive for the workers on the day. There may be accompanying inspection reports that help provide certainty about what you have.
Archives of meeting minutes discussing building changes.
User manuals, often kept in folders in an office.
Folders of correspondence with suppliers for big ticket expenditures like past refurbishments.
Past energy efficiency and heating consultancy reports. We sometimes find these in archives from the 1980s, during the last energy crisis.
From any conservation architect you retain.