The University of Cambridge is committed to reducing its environmental impact, with a dedicated Environment and Energy Section within Estate Management leading on carbon reduction and a range of strategic and operational initiatives. 

In January 2014, Monodraught were asked to develop a low energy cooling and ventilation strategy for Greenwich House at Cambridge University, as part of a planned building refurbishment into a modern and efficient collaborative office environment.

Monodraught worked closely with David Bedwell and Partners to engineer a scheme which met not only the performance criteria stipulated by the University’s strong sustainability ethos and standards, but also the thermal comfort levels expected by the building occupants.
Human perception of “comfortable” room temperature is subjective.  It is based on a number of factors such as; air temperature, radiant temperature, humidity, individual metabolism and clothing.  Not everyone will experience “thermal comfort” at 20°C-22°C and therefore occupants prefer to control their own comfort.

Cool-phase is a low energy cooling and ventilation system that creates a comfortable, fresh and healthy indoor environment and also reduces the running costs of buildings.   It works upon the principles of adaptive thermal comfort, controlling temperatures within a “thermally comfortable” bandwidth and gives end users more flexibility in controlling their environment.

Monodraught installed the Cool-phase systems and Windcatcher X-Air in a number of open plan office areas, several conference and meeting rooms, training rooms and a café area.

With the system’s ability to record minute by minute data from an integral data logger, plus BACnet connectivity, Monodraught will return to site later in the year to extract this data and provide an audit of performance as part of its post-occupancy analysis service.  The reporting system also allows the Estate Management team to track performance on an ongoing basis.