Renovation Costs Research Articles

Discharge Criteria for Children Sedated by Nonanesthesiologists: Is “Safe” Really Safe Enough?

Discharge Criteria for Children Sedated by Nonanesthesiologists: Is “Safe” Really Safe Enough?

Multiple criteria decision support web‐based system for building refurbishment

In order to design and realise an efficient building refurbishment, it is necessary to carry out an exhaustive investigation of all solutions that form it, ie planimetric and volumetric changes, the elimination of building deterioration and obsolescence, the improvement of architectural and aesthetic appearance and indoor environmental quality, etc). The efficiency level of the considered building's refurbishment depends on many factors, including cost of refurbishment, annual fuel economy after refurbishment, tentative pay‐back time, harm to health of the materials used, aesthetics, maintenance properties, functionality, comfort, sound insulation and longevity, etc. Solutions of an alternative character allow for a more rational and realistic assessment of economic, ecological, legislative, climatic, social and political conditions, traditions and for better satisfaction of architectural, comfort, functional, maintenance and other customer's requirements. They also enable one to cut down on refurbishment costs. The selection of a refurbishment version mostly depends on the needs and existing financial capability of tenants. Based on an analysis of the existing neural networks, information, expert and decision support systems and in order to determine the most efficient versions of building refurbishment, a Multiple Criteria Decision Support Web‐Based System for Building Refurbishment (BR‐DSS) consisting of a database, database management system, model‐base, model‐base management system and a user interface was developed. The developed BR‐DSS and its practical application are described in the paper. Basing oneself on the developed system and database, it is possible to perform the alternative design of a building's refurbishment, multiple criteria analysis and make the selection of the most efficient versions, etc. First Published Online: 14 Oct 2010

Estimating the value enhancement effects of refurbishment

There have been very few empirical studies investigating the value enhancement effects of refurbishment and most rely on cross‐sectional data, which cannot show the before and after effects conclusively because of the heterogeneous nature of the properties. The problem of refurbishment is more complicated in buildings or housing estates with multiple‐ownerships, since refurbishment is a collective decision, which can sometimes be difficult to achieve. Uses panel data in Hong Kong to estimate the impact of refurbishment on the market value of properties in a large housing estate. The results show that the refurbishment brought about approximately a 9 per cent increase in the market value of the properties, which far exceeds the cost of refurbishment. Suggests that property owners of a housing estate will benefit if they can reach a collective decision on renovation.

Siemens posts power plant orders worth €1.3 billion

With a high back-work ratio and a high exhaust-temperature, the simple cycle gas-turbine generation system usually has a low generation-efficiency especially when the ambient weather is hot. Among many technologies to improve the efficiency of a simple-cycle gas-turbine, inlet-air cooling, and steam reinjection are considered the best ways to modify an existing simple cycle unit without major destruction to its original integrity. To evaluate the individual effects after system modifications, a computer code for the simulation of the power-generation system was developed and validated in this study, and the ABSIM code developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory was adopted to simulate the absorption refrigeration system. Based on the calculated improvement and the associated benefits, the estimated cost of refurbishment and other operational costs, economic analyses were performed under the current fuel and cost structures. Results indicate that the system with the steam reinjection feature has the highest generation-efficiency and thus the most potential profit on investment, while the system with both inlet-air cooling and steam reinjection features can generate the highest power-output and release the least exergy via the flue gases.

Reducing light and sound in the neonatal intensive care unit: an evaluation of patient safety, staff satisfaction and costs.

To modify an existing Level III neonatal intensive care unit and to compare light and sound levels in the renovated nursery with an adjacent traditionally configured nursery. Further, to assess the impact of this practice on patient safety, staff perceptions of the nursery environments, and to document costs of renovation. Prospective comparison of light and sound levels in identical six-bed patient rooms within an existing intensive care unit. One room was modified to reduce light and sound, and the other served as a control. Costs of renovation were documented. Patient characteristics, severity of illness and safety outcomes were documented following modifications. Physician and nursing staff were surveyed on their perceptions of the renovations. Both light and sound were reduced with modifications that incurred modest costs. Patient safety was not influenced adversely by reduced light or sound levels. Staff members were highly satisfied with reductions in sound levels. Reactions to reduced lighting levels were more mixed and led to modification of bedside lighting. Cost-effective renovations to an existing NICU are possible, desirable, and do not impact patient safety. The reductions achieved, however, are less than those reached with new construction.

Cost-Effectiveness of Increasing Airtightness of Houses

In a cold climate such as of Montreal, the air infiltration through the exterior envelope of a house has a significant impact on the heating energy consumption and cost. The renovation of existing houses for increasing the airtightness up to the level of new, well-built houses can lead to the reduction of heating energy cost. This paper estimates the cost-effectiveness of this type of renovation by considering (1) the life-cycle energy consumption; (2) the initial cost of renovation; and (3) the CO2 tax credits, which take into account the environmental impact of increasing the airtightness of existing houses. The results show that the increase of airtightness of existing houses is not always cost-effective in the Montreal area.

The Ridgely House Venture: Triple Net Commercial Lease/Purchase Case

This case examines the tax, financial accounting, and governmental reporting consequences of a private Developer's actual purchase, renovation, and transfer of Ridgely House—an historical building in Ridgely, Maryland—to the Town of Ridgely. In short, the Developer purchases the building for $110,000 and incurs $190,000 in renovation costs to convert the property to a Town Hall and Police Station. He then “leases” the property back to the Town under terms and conditions outlined in a lease/purchase agreement (which can be viewed on the Web at http://faculty.ssu.edu/∼kjsmith/ridgely.htm). The case is constructed from the background information and actual lease/purchase agreement provided by the Developer. The terms of the agreement raise several questions regarding the proper tax and financial accounting treatment of various aspects of the transaction. The Developer (lessor) questions whether the transaction is to be reported for tax and financial-reporting purposes as a rental or a sale, if the property qualifies for a federal historical tax credit, and what net cash flow can be expected from the project. As an optional assignment (at the instructor's discretion), the Town (lessee) questions whether it has entered into an operating or capital lease, how to record the transaction in accordance with Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) guidelines, and what disclosures are required on its Statement of Financial Position. The case background, key lease/purchase agreement terms, and actual lease/purchase agreement provide the prerequisite material for solving the case requirements. In addition, outside resources (textbooks, online tax and financial accounting web sites, etc.) should be consulted in the process of seeking solutions to the questions posed by the Developer and the Town Commissioners. It is suggested that solutions to the case requirements be presented to the instructor in the form of an Executive Summary with supporting documentation and schedules.

Valuing the refurbishment cycle

This paper presents a simple method to assess the value of a commercial property, considering the cost and timing of refurbishment. It is constructed on the understanding that net rental income tends to decrease as the property ages, while maintenance cost increases with time. As a result, there is a desirable duration of successive leases, at the end of which refurbishment can take place. A suitable choice of this duration could give a higher value to the property. By assessing the value of a property over one refurbishment cycle, values for similar successive cycles can be capitalised. This approach is equivalent to finding the annual equivalent of the discounted cash flow over one cycle, and then capitalising it as if it is a constant income to perpetuity.

戸建住宅のライフサイクルコストの推計

This is an estimation of the life cycle cost (LCC) of Japanese wooden detached houses. From a questionnaire research, we calculated the survival probability of various part of a house and remaining rate. The years of 50% remaining rate is taken as a standard repair interval to make a simulation model of life cycle refurbishment of a house. The refurbishment cost was estimated from interviews to the professionals or the analysis of real cases. Applying them to the simulation model, LCC of 30 year life is estimated to be 2.16 times of new construction cost, and that of 60 year life is 3.25 times.

MEDIC — a method for predicting residual service life and refurbishment investment budgets

In the European project, EPIQR deterioration of building materials and components is described by the use of a classification system with four classes for the qualitative condition of, e.g., a facade or window. The prediction of the probable period of passing into the next (worse) deterioration state is of high interest as this is directly connected to higher refurbishment costs. MEDIC, which stands for “Méthode d'Évaluation de scénarios de Dégradation probables d'Investissements Correspondants” is a proposal for a new method to predict the future degradation state of the building. It calculates for each element regarded in EPIQR the probability to pass from one class to another during time. The prediction is based on the combination of the a priori probability based on experience from a large number of previous investigations/refurbishments and the current state of the object under study.

Pasture Renovation and Grazing Management Impacts on Cool-Season Grass Pastures

Legumes have been shown to increase production in cool-season grass pastures. However, they are included in relatively few acres of pasture. A split plot experiment with six replications was conducted to evaluate the impact of pasture renovation and grazing management on forage production and species composition of cool-season grass pastures. Grazing management main plots were grazed to leave low (2-4 in.), medium (4-6 in.), or high (6-8 in.) residue levels. Main plots were intensively grazed (50 000-70 000 lb of cows per acre) five or six times per grazing season by lactating Holstein cows. Subplot pasture renovation treatments were (i) an untreated check, or sprayed with glyphosate and interseeded with (ii) alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.), (iii) red clover (Trifolium pratense L.) and birdsfoot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus L.), or (iv) graziers mix (a mixture of legumes and grasses). Areas that were grazed to leave low residue level produced less forage mass (4.7 ton/acre) than areas grazed to medium (5.4 ton/acre) or high (5.5 ton/acre) residue levels. When averaged across years and grazing management treatments, renovated areas produced 1.8 ton/acre (46%) more forage than the control. Of interseeded species, alfalfa, red clover, and orchardgrass persisted through the study (more than 25% of the dry matter in at least one of the pasture renovation treatments). By June 1998, thistle (Carduus and Cirsium spp.) was present in all treatments. Fewer thistle was present in areas that were grazed to leave low residue (10 sq yd) than high residue (18 sq yd) and in renovated areas (9 sq yd) than the control (22 sq yd). The additional forage produced as a result of pasture renovation cost from $8.07/ton to $12.81/ton. Tbis study indicates that pasture renovation can be a valuable tool for increasing forage production in cool-season grass pastures.

Air pollution and buildings: An estimation of damage costs in france

The total damage cost is the sum of renovation cost and amenity loss. We show that amenity loss can be inferred from renovation expenditures without carrying out a contingent valuation; the amenity loss is approximately equal to the renovation cost. We review the methodologies for calculating air pollution damage to buildings, as well as the data available for their implementation in France. There are no inventories of building materials and surface areas for France, but we have been able to obtain data for frequencies and costs of renovation activities. By regressing these data we derive a “combined dose-response function” for the renovation cost as a function of pollution. We find that the most important variables are income and concentration of particles, whereas a correlation with SO 2 is not clear. This could be understood if most renovation expenditures in France are occasioned by soiling (primarily due to particles) rather than corrosion (primarily due to SO 2). For historical buildings and monuments we have been able to find only data for total national expenditures; they imply that the cost of pollution damage is somewhat smaller than for utilitarian buildings. Based on detailed models for atmospheric dispersion and for the geographical distribution of buildings, we calculate the damage cost caused by individual sources of pollution. We compare our results with other estimates in the literature, and we discuss the uncertainties. We also find that, compared to the cost of health damage, the cost of damage to buildings is smaller by about two orders of magnitude.

The genetic algorithms for the optimization of distributed loudspeaker systems

In reverberant and highly noisy environments, public address systems are often used in order to improve the speech intelligibility. Nevertheless, a number of common problems are generally encountered with such installations. Too many distributed loudspeaker systems suffer an inappropriate utilization of loudspeakers which leads to an excessive excitation of reverberant field and a poor audience coverage decreasing the intelligibility. Two rules of thumb have been well formulated to optimize uniformity of audience coverage, but both of them did not take in account the emission of the loudspeaker in its acoustic environment. Too many sound systems, in factories and public spaces, are therefore ineffective and do not respect the safety standards. Nowadays, it is possible to predict the acoustic performance and to simulate the radiation of a sound system in space by the means of geometric approach. The utilization of such a program with natural algorithms allows the optimization of the positioning and the number of loudspeakers by considering the acoustic characteristics of the room and sources. The performance of this method is applied in the case of choosing a best configuration from 16 possible loudspeaker locations in a classroom in order to obtain an optimum speech intelligibility and allow a smaller cost of renovation.

Technological Progress, Job Creation, and Job Destruction

New technology embodied in capital equipment can be adopted either through destruction of existing jobs and the creation of new ones or by renovation, updating the job's equipment. Under the assumption that the destruction of jobs generates worker layoffs, we show that higher productivity growth induces lower unemployment when renovation costs are low, but that the response of employment to growth switches from positive to negative as the cost of updating existing technology rises above a unique critical level. The effects of idiosyncratic productivity differences and cross sector mobility on the aggregate relationship between growth and unemployment are also studied.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: D92, E24, J41, J63, J64.

Bayes Linear Sufficiency and Systems of Expert Posterior Assessments

SUMMARY Data arising in the form of expert assessments are received by a decision maker. The decision maker is required to estimate a set of unknown quantities, and receives expert assessments at varying levels of accuracy, on samples of the quantities of interest. We present a Bayes linear analysis of this problem. In the absence of other assessments, the decision maker will accept as his or her current estimate of any single quantity the most accurate received assessment of that quantity. This leads to a sufficiency property which allows a simple decomposition of the error structure of assessments. Bayes linear estimation is then used by the decision maker to estimate each quantity of interest given an arbitrary collection of received assessments. The analysis is motivated throughout by a practical context in which a large company needs to estimate costs for renovation of assets. The methodology is illustrated with a numerical example.

Radiation Design and Control Features of a Hospital Room for a Low Dose Rate Remote Afterloading Unit

We have renovated, and used for four years, a small 3.4 m x 4.3 m conventional patient second floor hospital room to accommodate a low dose rate remote afterloading unit containing 13 GBq (0.35 Ci) of 137Cs. Supplemental room shielding consists of a power assisted door (536 kg, 1.7 cm thickness of lead), 1.3 cm lead wall shielding at selected wall locations and on a projector shield beneath the bed, and 0.6 cm of lead over the floor above. Radiation control features consisted of a room interior radiation detector independent of the remote afterloading unit, a redundant patient/nurse communication system, a remote control system, a door interlock system to insert and retract the radioactive pellets, and a visible and audible status indicator system located at a nearby nurses' work station. Renovation costs (in 1990 dollars) were $383 per square foot; total project costs were $187,000. Nursing personnel radiation exposure was reduced from about 6 microSv (mg Ra eq)-1 (0.6 mrem (mg Ra eq)-1) to about 0.7 microSv (mg Ra eq)-1 (0.07 mrem (mg Ra eq)-1, almost a tenfold reduction.

Installation of 60Co 100-Cm Source-To-Axis Distance Teletherapy Units in Vaults Designed for 80-cm Units

60Co teletherapy units featuring 100 cm source-to-axis distances and with nominal source activities of 481 TBq (13,000 Ci) are available as replacements for older model 80 cm source-to-axis teletherapy units that generally have source activities of less than 370 TBq (10,000 Ci). We have redesigned and renovated two vaults--one of which required supplemental shielding--designed for older 80 cm source-to-axis units with 333 TBq (9,000 Ci) sources and installed modern 100 cm source-to-axis units with 481 TBq (13,000 Ci) sources. Renovation costs (in 1991 U.S. dollars) were about $40,000 and $160,000; the latter, including shielding costs, was about two-thirds of projected costs for installation of a 6 MV electron beam linear accelerator (linac). We have designed the treatment heads of these 100 cm 60Co units to accept the secondary field shaping blocks used on 100 cm source-to-axis linacs, allowing the 60Co units to be used as emergency back-up units for linacs when they are inoperable.

建物劣化診断・整備提案システムの開発

To provide facility management service, the Building Maintenance Planning System, a comprehensive expert system supporting inspection and diagnosis of building elements, rehabilitation planning and proposal had been developed and is being introducing. By using the system, current deterioration level and deterioration projection of inspected building elements are diagnosed and appropriate renovation specification are selected automatically. And finally, a rehabilitation proposal with renovation cost and performance recovery information is prepared for building managers. The concept and main structure of the system are based on accumulated results of research and development in building maintenance area conducted in NTT for last forty years.

Coût des salissures causées aux bâtiments par le trafic routier: aspects méthodologiques et résultats empiriques pour la ville de Neuchâtel (Suisse)

Road traffic incurs costs which it does not cover. Of these ‘external costs’, mention should be made of the soiling caused to buildings by emissions from motor vehicles. This type of damage shortens the time interval separating two successive renovation operations. Pollution engendered by road traffic thus causes additional maintenance costs for buildings near roads. It is important that the amount of this additional cost should be evaluated, especially in order to apply the ‘polluter pays’ principle and to allocate the external cost to transport users (internalization). Our Institute has developed an evaluation method centred specifically on soiling caused by road traffic. A sample of buildings located on main roads has been analysed and the results (frequencies and costs of restorations) were compared with these of another sample in an unexposed zone. The external cost of soilings caused to buildings by road traffic thus amounts to nearly Sfr 1.6 million. Depending on the high and low hypotheses for renovation costs and on the definition of exposed buildings, this amount may vary by ±30−35%.

Using Fiber Optics for Laser Cladding

In many Navy structures, there are many large components that are coated for wear protection (valve seats) and/or for corrosion protection (hatch seals) that require periodic refurbishment. This refurbishment is normally accomplished using conventional arc welding processes which in many cases require that the part be removed from the structure to properly control the pre-weld, interpass, and post-weld temperatures as required by the materials used. The removal of such large components, the thermal requirements, and the resulting distortion can greatly increase the cost for refurbishment. The Navy Manufacturing Technology Office (MANTECH) of the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy has been funding two major programs through Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA 5142), and the Applied Research Laboratory, The Pennsylvania State University (ARL Penn State) to decrease such high refurbishment costs. The first program is the development of high-powered laser cladding processes for the refurbishment of components that can be removed from the ship and into a laser materials processing facility. The second, and the primary topic of this paper, is the development of a shipboard laser materials processing system that utilizes fiber optics.