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October 2010 – Energy savings for sheds

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Release of the first BCSA/Corus Target Zero report, on schools, earlier this year certainly made them sit up even at the back of the class with its myth slaying revelations about the illusory thermal mass performance of heavyweight concrete building frames. It also showed how using structural steelwork could make a sustainability impact that would shave £165M from the UK’s annual schools heating bill. That is just the sort of easily achieved saving that the new public sector cost conscious government needs to hear about.

News just as good for operators of warehouses is to be found in the latest report in the Target Zero series, on warehouses, with savings of almost £2.5M in energy costs possible over a 25-year term from just one warehouse. What does that add up to nationally? The warehouse in the Target Zero study is some 382,000 sq ft. The 650 members of the UK Warehousing Association alone operate some 10M sq m of warehouses. So something over £2,000M is the least that could be expected to be saved by just 650 warehouse operators.

That will be music to the ears of companies in just about every industry, retailers and wholesalers particularly, but also to any user of single storey industrial buildings – where steel has an overwhelmingly dominant share of the market for already very good reasons.

This research places UK designers in a strong position along the road map towards meeting ambitious government carbon reduction targets that is represented by Part L of the new Building Regulations. Further emissions and energy saving guidance is still to come in reports for offices, supermarkets and mixed use developments. Steel is proving again and again to be the sensible business choice for our low or zero carbon sustainable future.

New look NSC

There is a new look to NSC from this issue, following a redesign by our in house graphic designers. The aim was to freshen up a five year old design, making it even easier to read and allowing layouts to have more visual impact without losing any of the magazine’s authority.

The layout is now more flexible and more compact typefaces allow more space to be given to photographs. The dominant colour you will notice is now a more attention grabbing red.

Captions are now in white boxes on the photographs that they refer to, so readers no longer have to search to match a caption to a photo. The start of each article is signposted by a “drop cap” at the start of the first paragraph.

Technical articles at the back will now be laid out in a two-column format with the minimum of artifice: pure information for engineers. Navigation through these articles is now as simple as possible, with adequate space allowed for diagrams, tables and equations to appear in line with the text.

NSC is a magazine full of informative features to read, as well as a tool full of useful reference material and technical articles. We hope you find that the redesign helps us fulfill both its functions better.

Nick Barrett
Editor

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