There is a growing awareness in the residential building industry about the significance of energy use in buildings and the desire to minimize energy consumption and costs. In the construction industry, the importance of building commissioning to verify the installation and performance of various building systems is rising.

Post-occupancy evaluation (POE) of buildings goes beyond commissioning. POE is the systematic assessment of building performance during service and typically includes analysis of the users' perceptions.

A literature survey revealed the lack of a comprehensive POE methodology for multi-unit residential buildings (MURBs) that addresses the major building systems, including the building envelope. To fill this gap, a POE framework has been developed for MURBs.As very limited information is available in the public domain on the performance of MURBs, the information obtained from POEs could be of use to identify avenues of improvements to the benefit of building owners and occupants and to develop benchmark data on performance indicators to support the development of building codes, regulations, and guidelines. Evaluating the performance of new, innovative building systems and practices applied to newly constructed or retrofitted MURBs can serve to show whether promised benefits are actually delivered. The POE protocol focuses on seven performance areas: energy efficiency, water use efficiency, indoor air quality, lighting and the visual environment, acoustics, thermal comfort, and building envelope performance. This paper presents the literature survey findings, the protocol's objectives, the qualitative and quantitative indicators used to gauge performance, and an overviewof the methodology's various tasks, with emphasis on the building envelope performance assessment, and its interaction with other systems.

Presented at Thermal Performance of Exterior Envelopes of Whole Buildings XII, December 2013