Abstract
The way in which we plan and produce buildings today will influence our energy consumption in the future. This paper explores how the types of laundry facilities provided in owner-occupied multi-family buildings in Sweden have changed since the 1990s and seeks to draw attention to how this may impact energy consumption for laundry. Three factors are analyzed that influence energy consumption: the number of laundry appliances, energy performance in laundry appliances and user demand for laundry. The results indicate that there has been a change in building practices, from the domination of communal laundry rooms towards in-unit laundry facilities. The findings imply that the changes in provision of laundry facilities increase the number of appliances but do not necessarily increase energy consumption during the usage phase depending on energy performance and user behavior. Thus, developers should consider laundry facility organization when designing multi-family buildings in order to optimize the use of space and resources, given user demand and building regulations. This paper is exploratory in nature and indicates a shift in building practices that up until now has been undocumented in a research context which in turn opens up for many new research questions related to resource use but also related to the economics of developers, housing firms and households.
Highlights
The way in which we plan and produce buildings today will influence our energy consumption in the future
We have studied how developers’ building practices have changed in the case of laundry facility provision
Our study shows that there has been a shift in practices; in new construction for tenant-owner associations, the communal laundry rooms have largely been replaced by in-unit appliances
Summary
The way in which we plan and produce buildings today will influence our energy consumption in the future. Developers have the potential to provide better—or worse—conditions in new construction for energy-efficient behavior, for example when installing appliances. Developers seem to be increasingly installing in-unit washers and driers in each unit, and sometimes providing concurrent access to communal laundry facilities [2] Developers, it would seem, sacrifice the economies of scale derived from a centralized laundry system for consumer choice and convenience. If these observations reflect a systematic change in building practices, how may this way of organizing laundry facilities impact energy consumption?. A widespread breakthrough promoted by municipal housing firms during the post-war era helped make the communal laundry room standard in Swedish multi-family buildings. Today the approximately 30,000 communal laundry rooms in Swedish owner-occupied and rental multi-family buildings are equipped with an estimated
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