Organization of Laundry Facilities and Energy-Use in Owner-Occupied Multi-Family Buildings

How we plan and produce buildings today will influence our energy consumption in the future. The aim of this paper is to explore how organization of laundry facilities in owneroccupied multi-family buildings in Sweden has developed since the 1990s and draw attention to the impact this may have on energy consumption for laundry purposes. A risk analysis inspired approach analogous to probabilistic risk assessment was adopted to assess the potential impact of changed building practices. The paper shows that developers should take laundry facility organization into consideration when designing multi-family buildings in order to optimize the use of space and resources given user demand and building requirements. The findings imply that changed building practices do not necessarily increase energy consumption during the usage phase. This paper is exploratory in nature and indicates a shift in building practices which up until now has been undocumented in a research context.